Chestnut Holdings pays $4.4M to Buckingham Properties for residential walkup in Fordham Heights

Chestnut Holdings through the entity 2415 C LLC paid $4.4 million to Buckingham Properties through the entity 2415 Creston Avenue LLC for midblock 32-unit residential walkup building at 2415 Creston Avenue in Fordham Heights, Bronx.
The deal closed on April 7, 2022 and was recorded on April 19, 2022.The property has 27,200 square feet of built space and 28,152 square feet of additional air rights for a total buildable of 55,384 square feet according to PincusCo analysis of city data. The sale price per built square foot is $161 and the price per buildable square foot is $79 per the PincusCo analysis. (The price per square foot analysis is the transaction price divided by square feet as reported in public records and assumes no air rights have been sold.)
The seller bought the property on February 4, 2015, for $3.8 million. The signatory for Buckingham Properties was Richard Cohen. The signatory for Chestnut Holdings was Ben Rieder.

Prior sales and revenue

Prior to this transaction, Pincusco has records that the buyer Chestnut Holdings purchased 44 properties in 39 transactions for a total of $255.4 million and has no record it sold any properties over the past 24 months.
The seller Buckingham Properties had not purchased any other properties and sold one property in one transaction for a total of $3.4 million over the same time period. The former owners according to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development includes Richard Cohen, head officer and Michael Kocovic, officer. The business entity is 2415 Creston Avenue Llc. The 27,200-square-foot property generated revenue of $439,464 or $16 per square foot, according to the most recent income and expense figures.

The property

The 2415 Creston Avenue parcel has frontage of 76 feet and is 121 feet deep with a total lot size of 9,200 square feet. The lot is irregular. The zoning is R8 which allows for up to 6.02 times floor area ratio (FAR) for residential. The city-designated market value for the property in 2022 is $1.1 million.

Violations and lawsuits

The property was not involved in any lawsuits or bankruptcies in the past years. In addition, according to city public data, the property has received two DOB violations in the last year.

Development

There are no active new building construction projects or major alteration projects with initial costs more than $5 million on this tax lot.

The neighborhood

In Fordham Heights, the bulk, or 43 percent of the 17.5 million square feet of commercial built space are residential elevator buildings, with residential walkup buildings next occupying 33 percent of the space. In sales, Fordham Heights has had very little sales volume relative to other neighborhoods with $101 million in sales volume in the last two years. For development, Fordham Heights has 2.8 times the average amount of major developments relative to other neighborhoods and is the 4th highest in Bronx. It had 2.5 million square feet of commercial and multi-family construction under development in the last two years, which represents 14 percent of the neighborhood’s built space.

The block

On this tax block, PincusCo has identified the owners of three of the 16 commercial properties representing 50,260 square feet of the 495,608 square feet. The largest owner is DSA Property Group, followed by Pistilli Realty Group and then Gjek Popaj. There are two active new building construction projects totaling 64,282 square feet. The largest is a 40-unit, 34,842-square-foot R-2 building developed by Ian Cheng with plans filed June 20, 2012 and it has not been permitted yet. The second largest is a 51-unit, 29,440-square-foot R-2 building developed by Gjek Popaj with plans filed November 17, 2020 and permitted April 15, 2022.

The majority, or 50 percent of the 617,380 square feet of built space are residential elevator buildings, with residential walkup buildings next occupying 41 percent of the space.

The buyer

The PincusCo database currently indicates that Chestnut Holdings owned at least 35 commercial properties with 1,564,336 square feet and a city-determined market value of $157.1 million. (Market value is typically about 50% of actual value.) The portfolio has $211.2 million in debt, with top three lenders as JPMorgan Chase, New York Community Bank, and Signature Bank respectively. Within the portfolio, the bulk, or 50 percent of the 1,564,336 square feet of built space are residential walkup properties, with residential elevator properties next occupying 44 percent of the space. The bulk, or 68 percent of the built space, is in Bronx, with Manhattan next at 18 percent of the space.

Surrounding

Within a 400-foot radius of 2415 Creston Avenue, Pincusco identified four commercial real estate items of interests occurred over the past 24 months.
One of those four items was a sale which Aranit Ahmetaj bought the 9,000-square-foot, one-unit mixed-use building (K2) on 2431 Grand Concourse for $6.8 million from Hasan Biberaj on February 1, 2021.
Of those four items, three were loans above $5 million totaling $22.9 million. The most recent of the three was Gjek Popaj which borrowed $8.8 million from Northeast Community Bank secured by the 0-square-foot industrial (G7) on 113 East 184th Street on October 22, 2021.

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