Greenbrook Partners pays $4.2M for 9-unit walkup in Brooklyn Heights

Greenbrook Partners through the entity 32 Pierrepont St LLC paid $4.2 million to Rachel Foster through the entity 321 Pierrepont LLC for midblock nine-unit residential walkup building at 32 Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn.
The deal closed on March 16, 2022 and was recorded on April 1, 2022.The property has 6,310 square feet of built space according to PincusCo analysis of city data. The sale price per built square foot is $665 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 August 23, 2018, for $2.9 million. The signatory for Rachel Foster was Rachel Foster. The signatory for Greenbrook Partners was Gregory Fournier. Gregory Fournier is managing principal of Greenbrook Partners.

Listen to Sean Lefkovits of Davean Holdings and James Nelson of Avison Young discuss the high-volume multifamily buying market that includes Greenbrook Partners.

Prior sales and revenue

Prior to this transaction, PincusCo has records that the buyer Greenbrook Partners purchased 60 properties in 60 transactions for a total of $249.5 million and sold five properties in five transactions for a total of $31.6 million over the past 24 months.
The seller Rachel Foster had not purchased any other properties and had not sold any properties over the same time period. The former owner according to the Department of Housing Preservation and Development is Patricia Perlman, head officer. The business entity is 321 Pierrepont Llc.

The property

The 32 Pierrepont Street parcel has frontage of 20 feet and is 100 feet deep with a total lot size of 2,000 square feet. The zoning is R6 which allows for up to 2.43 times floor area ratio (FAR) for residential. The property is in the Brooklyn Heights Historic District. The city-designated market value for the property in 2022 is $3.3 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 housing 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 Brooklyn Heights, the bulk, or 38 percent of the 21.1 million square feet of commercial built space are residential elevator buildings, with office buildings next occupying 15 percent of the space. In sales, Brooklyn Heights has had very little sales volume relative to other neighborhoods with $228.8 million in sales volume in the last two years. For development, Brooklyn Heights has had very little major development activity relative to other neighborhoods.It had 261,202 square feet of commercial and multi-family construction under development in the last two years, which represents 1 percent of the neighborhood’s built space.

The block

On this tax block, PincusCo has identified the owners of three of the five commercial properties representing 59,982 square feet of the 71,821 square feet. The largest owner is Teresa Viola, followed by Fine Times and then Laquasia Thomas. There are no active new building construction projects on this tax block.

The majority, or 74 percent of the 342,428 square feet of built space are residential elevator buildings, with 1-4 family buildings next occupying 7 percent of the space.

The buyer

The PincusCo database, which is incomplete, currently indicates that Greenbrook Partners owned at least 84 commercial properties with 543,159 square feet and a city-determined market value of $153.1 million. (Market value is typically about 50% of actual value.) The portfolio has $285.8 million in debt, with top three lenders as Invesco Real Estate, Rialto Capital Management, and Connectone Bank respectively. Within the portfolio, the bulk, or 63 percent of the 543,159 square feet of built space are residential walkup properties, with 1-4 family properties next occupying 15 percent of the space. The bulk, or 98 percent of the built space, is in Brooklyn, with Queens next at 2 percent of the space.

Surrounding

Within a 400-foot radius of 32 Pierrepont Street, Pincusco identified six commercial real estate items of interests occurred over the past 24 months.
One of those six items was a sale which Michele Fieland Pauker bought the 8,230-square-foot, eight-unit rental (C1) on 144 Willow Street for $8.3 million from Benchmark Real Estate Group on January 31, 2020.
Of those six items, five were loans above $5 million totaling $177.7 million. The most recent of the five was Fine Times which borrowed $50 million from Citibank secured by the 30,480-square-foot, 10-unit rental (C1) on 6 Pierrepont Street and 19 other properties on August 10, 2021.

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