Tankhouse sues over $14.5M Gowanus contract dispute

Developer Tankhouse filed a lawsuit in Brooklyn State Supreme Court on Friday alleging the owner of the commercial property at 442-450 Carroll Street in Gowanus, Brooklyn, has not complied with terms of a $14.5 million sale contract. Tankhouse is seeking to force the seller to comply in order to complete the sale. The seller, for its part, said through its lawyer that it has complied and that the contract is terminated. The property is referred to as 444 Carroll Street in the complaint.

Case LINK

Court filings represent the position of one party and are not necessarily accurate or complete.

The complaint states that, “Defendant has failed to tender the ‘correction deed,'” which is needed because the, “description in the last deed of record [from 2014] is erroneous in that it is missing the last course,” of the metes and bounds.

Neither Tankhouse nor co-founder Sam Alison-Mayne are identified in the complaint by name, but co-founder Sebastian Mendez is copied on correspondence and the buyer entity is located at the address and suite of Tankhouse.

According to the complaint, “The Property is a currently unused commercial property that Plaintiff intends to develop for residential or mixed-use residential and commercial purposes.”

The contract date was June 5, 2022, and the closing has been delayed three times, with the most recent date set for August 2, 2023, according to the filing.

The property

The parcel has frontage of 94 feet and is 242 feet deep with a total lot size of 28,292 square feet. The lot is irregular. The zoning is M1-4/R6B which allows for up to 2 times floor area ratio (FAR) for manufacturing and up to 2 times FAR for residential with inclusionary housing. The city-designated market value for the property in 2022 is $1.2 million.

Development

Over the past five years, there has been no NYC Department of Buildings new building, demolition, or alteration permit application valued at more than $20,000 filed for this parcel.

Violations and lawsuits

According to city public data, the property has not received any significant violations in the last year.

There were no lawsuits or bankruptcies filed against the property for the past 24 months.

The neighborhood

In Gowanus, The bulk, or 46 percent of the 9.2 million square feet of commercial built space are industrial buildings, with elevator buildings next occupying 19 percent of the space. In sales, Gowanus has near average sales volume among other neighborhoods with $708.6 million in sales volume in the last two years and is the 8th highest in Brooklyn. For development, Gowanus is the 7th most active neighborhood among other neighborhoods. It had 4.6 million square feet of commercial and multi-family construction under development in the last two years, which represents 50 percent of the neighborhood’s built space.

The block

On this tax block, PincusCo has identified the owners of two of the nine commercial properties representing 1,834 square feet of the 142,069 square feet. The two identified owners are McCallum Burr Alexandra and Vorea Group. On the tax block, there were two new building construction projects totaling 331,544 square feet. The largest is a 360-unit, 313,672 square-foot residential (R-2) building submitted by VOREA Group and filed by Peter Papamichael with plans filed October 29, 2021 and permitted June 8, 2022. The second largest is a one-unit, 17,872 square-foot industrial (F-2) building submitted by Michel Cohen with plans filed July 17, 2015 and permitted April 10, 2019.

The surrounding

Within a 400-foot radius of 450 Carroll Street, PincusCo identified two commercial real estate items of interests occurred over the past 24 months. Of those two items, one was in new building development. It was a new building permit application filed on November 18, 2021 for a 64,730-square-foot residential (R-2) building with 72 residential units at 417 Carroll Street. One of those two items was a loan which Domain Companies and VOREA Group borrowed $176 million from Bank OZK secured by the 0-square-foot development site (V1) on 420 Carroll Street on July 12, 2022.

Direct link to the property’s ACRIS page and link to DOB NOW portal.