Lubavitch congregation pays $2.8M for mixed-use in Crown Heights

Congregation Oholei Yosef Yitzchok Lubavitch paid $2.8 million to Harry Abramowicz and Gil Lazar for the two-unit mixed-use building (S2) at 333 Albany Avenue in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
The deal closed on March 3, 2023 and was recorded on March 9, 2023. The property has 4,180 square feet of built space according to PincusCo analysis of city data. The sale price per built square foot is $657 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 May 30, 2017, for $305,475. The signatory for Harry Abramowicz and Gil Lazar was Harry Abramowicz and Gil Lazar. The signatory for Congregation Oholei Yosef Yitzchok Lubavitch was Mottel Schneiderman. Mottel Schneiderman is president of Congregation Oholei Yosef Yitzchok Lubavitch.

Prior sales and revenue

Prior to this transaction, Pincusco has no record that the buyer Congregation Oholei Yosef Yitzchok Lubavitch had purchased any other properties and has no record it sold any properties over the past 24 months.
The seller Harry Abramowicz had not purchased any other properties and had not sold any properties over the same time period.

The property

The 333 Albany Avenue parcel has frontage of 19 feet and is 63 feet deep with a total lot size of 1,207 square feet. The zoning is R4 which allows for up to 0.75 times floor area ratio (FAR) for residential. The city-designated market value for the property in 2022 is $1.3 million.

Violations and lawsuits

There were no lawsuits or bankruptcies filed against the property since September of 2020. In addition, according to city public data, the property has received $150 in OATH penalties 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 Crown Heights, the bulk, or 38 percent of the 46.5 million square feet of commercial built space are walkup buildings, with elevator buildings next occupying 36 percent of the space. In sales, Crown Heights has 1.7 times the average sales volume among other neighborhoods with $592.8 million in sales volume in the last two years and is the 9th highest in Brooklyn. For development, Crown Heights has 2.9 times the average amount of major developments relative to other neighborhoods and is the 6th highest in Brooklyn. It had 2.9 million square feet of commercial and multi-family construction under development in the last two years, which represents 6 percent of the neighborhood’s built space. There was one pre-foreclosure suit filed among other mixed-use buildings in the past 12 months.

The block

On this tax block, PincusCo has identified the owners of eight of the 19 commercial properties representing 104,256 square feet of the 150,246 square feet. The largest owner is Sugar Hill Capital Partners, followed by Shaul Cohen and then Mordechai G. Piller.
there are no active new building construction projects on this tax block.

The majority, or 87 percent of the 148,326 square feet of built space are walkup buildings, with mixed-use buildings next occupying 13 percent of the space.

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