A onetime piece of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Brooklyn real estate empire traded hands after a decade that saw it developed into luxury condos.
Midtown-based Hubb Properties paid $85 million for 181 Front Street, a 12-story, 105-unit apartment building in Dumbo, Crain’s reported. The sale marks an exit for the Carlyle Group, which took over the site in 2014 for $21.4 million, before the building existed.
The deal breaks down to $810,000 per unit.
Megalith Capital assembled the parcel a year before Carlyle acquired it as part of a larger deal with the Witnesses, who spent decades unloading their vast Dumbo and Brooklyn Heights holdings after shifting headquarters upstate. Megalith is listed as the developer of the project, but the status of the firm and its partnership with Carlyle is unclear.
Aufgang Architects designed the rental, which broke ground in 2015 and wrapped in 2018, one of several developments that helped cement Dumbo’s transition from industrial district to full-fledged luxury enclave.
Availabilities include a one-bedroom asking $4,381 a month, according to StreetEasy.
Carlyle and Hubb both did not comment to the publication about the sale.
Private equity giant Carlyle quietly put together a half-billion-dollar portfolio of small apartment buildings in Brooklyn in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. Over a one-year period, the company bought more than 130 properties in hot neighborhoods such as Bushwick, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Park Slope and Cobble Hill.
The spree represented one of Wall Street’s biggest moves into the world of mom-and-pop landlords and an unusual approach for such a large company, buying up apartment buildings one by one.
Hubb, founded in 2011, bills itself as an all-cash buyer with more than 80 properties in its portfolio. An affiliate of the company recently paid $20.3 million for an apartment building at 254 Water Street; the seller of the 26-unit property was Michael Alvandi’s City Urban Realty, which purchased the property in 2019 for $15 million.
— Holden Walter-Warner
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