JULY 22, 2019 VOL. 55, No. 29
westfaironline.com
A living room in one of the apartments at The Mason. Photos by Peter Katz.
INSIDE
Youth movement
FOURTH-GENERATION WESTCHESTER DEVELOPER MANAGING TRANSIT-ORIENTED PROJECT IN MAMARONECK PAGE
2
CONDO SALES RISE
PAGE
4
TAX BREAKS OPPOSED
BY PETER KATZ pkatz@westfairinc.com
“W
e are actively seeking more investments in Westchester,” Joel Halpern, the fourth generation of Halperns involved in Westchester real estate, told the Business Journal during an interview at The Mason, an apartment and townhome development in Mamaroneck. “Port Chester is one of our highest-inter-
est markets. Port Chester has great coverage of opportunity zones,” he said. Opportunity zones, designated by the federal government, are areas in need of economic development where investors and real estate developers can have their investments rewarded with special tax breaks. The 27-year-old grew up in Harrison, graduated from George Washington University in 2014 and immediately got into the family’s real estate business. The
property for The Mason project was acquired in 2013 by Halpern Real Estate Ventures and Rosen Development Group for $3.5 million in a bankruptcy auction. The younger Halpern subsequently was charged with managing the project. The 2.7-acre site is at 270 Waverly Ave. “We bought the site with approvals in place, but it took us a couple of years of predevelopment just managing some of the flooding issues with the Army Corps of Engineers, which we mitigated by raising the site about seven feet,” Halpern said. “We have 100 units in this complex, which is broken up among three main apartment buildings and a cluster of » HALPERN
6
AVON SELLS RYE BUILDING ON 18 ACRES FOR $23M BY PETER KATZ pkatz@westfairinc.com AVON CAPITAL CORP., THE DOMESTIC real estate and financing vehicle for cosmetics giant Avon Products Inc. and its subsidiaries, has sold the company’s property at 601 and 621 Midland Ave. in Rye. The sprawling 176,000-squarefoot facility is on 18.13 acres of land and had been housing Avon’s data center and related operations. The property was purchased by Midland Rye LLC, a vehicle of real estate firm George Comfort & Sons, the Feil Organization, a New York City-based real estate investment, development and management firm, and O’Connor Capital Partners. Midland Rye LLC uses the same Manhattan address as does George
Comfort & Sons. Comfort manages more than 12 million square feet of commercial property and has ownership interests in about 75% of the portfolio. It has branches in Stamford, Purchase, Washington, D.C., Princeton, New Jersey, and Beverly Hills, California. The sale price was $23,150,000 and PCSB Bank, headquartered in Yorktown Heights, provided a $14,750,000 mortgage, according to records at the Westchester County Clerk’s office. The former Avon property is next to the MetroNorth train station and within walking distance of Rye’s downtown area. It is near both I-95 and I-287. The commercial real estate advisory firm Newmark Knight Frank (NKF) secured the buyer » AVON
6