Brokers from ABS Partners Real Estate, CBRE and Savills are the winners of what’s often described as the Academy Awards of New York real estate, but it’s not because their commercial deals were the biggest or involved the most famous properties.
Randy Modell, Steven Hornstock and Gregg Schenker of ABS took home first prize at the Real Estate Board of New York’s Most Ingenious Deal of the Year Awards for brokering the sale of a residential building at 1450 Third Ave. on the Upper East Side. The brokers arranged for the building to be “cut” in half, with one side to be demolished while the other half remains occupied, the first such occurrence in the city, REBNY said.
The assignment involved relocating tenants in order to raze half the building, REBNY said. The Douglas Development redevelopment project is underway.
Major building infrastructure including gas and electric systems, boilers and fire escapes was rerouted while services and occupancy went uninterrupted, Woody Heller of Branton Realty Services and co-chair of the REBNY judge panel, said Wednesday.
Over the course of seven years, the brokers negotiated directly with 17 rent-stabilized tenants and “literally moved into the building themselves” to build trust and goodwill, Heller said.
“If you have one tenant remaining that you can't move, the whole thing blows up,” Heller said in an interview. “Part of the definition that I use for ingenuity is thinking of things that haven't been thought of before. … Carving a building in half while there are still tenants in the other half. No one's ever done that.”
The annual REBNY awards event attracted about 200 of New York’s top commercial brokers at Lever House in midtown Manhattan. Here are the other two winning deals that stood out from 17 submissions:
Auction house accommodations
Mary Ann Tighe and Lauren Crowley Corrinet of CBRE won second place for helping to guide the centuries-old luxury auction house Sotheby's through three complex transactions at once, REBNY said.
Sotheby’s “had long sought a real estate answer that could satisfy its complex and seemingly contradictory needs: a facility strong enough to support industrial-scale logistics — and refined enough to welcome the world’s most discerning clientele,” Heller said.
To meet Sotheby’s “complex logistical needs,” the brokers arranged its purchase of “an expansive, recently renovated space at 25-11 49th Ave. in the Long Island City neighborhood in Queens while helping it buy the iconic Breuer Building at 945 Madison Ave. on Manhattan’s Upper East Side from the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Sotheby’s paid $100 million for the Breuer Building and $82.5 million for the warehouse property, CoStar data shows.
The brokers also helped bring a competitive lease to Sotheby’s current space at 1334 York Ave. in Manhattan with the signing of Weill Cornell Medicine.
“Literally, there were six brokerage companies that had tried to solve Sotheby's quest over the decades,” Heller told CoStar News, adding that prior brokers’ attempts failed because they tried to satisfy Sotheby’s competing demands within a single building.
Geoffrey Newman of Savills won the third-place award for brokering the sale and redevelopment of The Community Church of New York’s properties at 24-40 E. 35th St. The decadelong deal process was “faced with unprecedented challenges, including pandemic induced market disruptions, zoning and legal barriers, tenant relocations, internal negotiations, and last-minute regulatory roadblocks,” REBNY said.
“There are these institutions that have existed for, in some cases, centuries, and because of the way that people are worshiping now … they're no longer viable, either financially or as an organization, and they have to figure out how to continue, or find a way to survive,” Newman told CoStar News. “That new way to survive is oftentimes the result of being able to monetize the real estate so that they have money to reimagine the mission.”
The deal involved relocating rent-regulated tenants and a school. When the church ran out of the money in the middle of the transaction during the pandemic, Newman said he had to go to a friend working at a bank to provide the church a loan to carry through the transaction.