Midtown Equities offers 205 Montague for sale
Developer Midtown Equities is hoping to sell a property in downtown Brooklyn in a deal that could help it buy one of the biggest development sites in Williamsburg.
The firm has put the large parcel it owns at 205 Montague St. in downtown Brooklyn up for sale for over $200 million. The site, currently home to a five-story retail and office building, allows for a 300,000-square-foot residential tower with affordable housing that could soar 700 feet or higher.
Midtown Equities has hired a sales team from Cushman & Wakefield led by Bob Knakal, Cushman’s chairman of investment sales in the city, to market the site and arrange a deal.
Meanwhile, Midtown Equities is trying to complete a $200 million-plus deal to acquire a huge property on the waterfront in Williamsburg. That site achieved widespread attention earlier this year when one of two warehouses there that are occupied by the records archive business Citi-Storage burned to the ground.
Community activists have called for the city to deliver on a past promise to transform the Citi-Storage property into a section of Bushwick Inlet Park, but so far, the city hasn’t made efforts to purchase it. Midtown Equities could build more than 600,000 square feet of manufacturing space as-of-right on the land. The company is rumored to be aiming for a deal with the city to convert a portion of the parcel into parkland in exchange for permission to develop retail, office and residential space on the inland portion.
A source familiar with the two deals said they weren’t connected. Midtown Equities, the source said, plans to reinvest the proceeds from 205 Montague Street into retail space it plans to purchase in high-street locations in the city and around the country. Still, a sale of 205 Montague St. could give Midtown Equities a handy slug of cash that it could potentially pour into the Citi-Storage deal if need be.
According to city records, Midtown Equities purchased 205 Montague St. for $33 million in 2010, then paid another $3.2 million in 2012 to the city to remove previous development restrictions on the site. Midtown Equities subsequently purchased neighboring air rights to increase the amount of square footage that can be built on the site to 300,000 square feet. The company developed plans for both a 44-story and a 62-story tower at the site, according to marketing materials produced by Cushman & Wakefield. Renderings of Midtown Equities’ plans show that the company wanted to preserve a portion of the commercial building currently at 205 Montague. That property is home to a TD Bank and has Cushman & Wakefield’s Brooklyn office on its second floor. Midtown Equities’ renderings show at least half of that building left intact and joined to a new residential tower that would rise adjacent to the preserved structure.
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