NEW YORK CITY-In a multi-faceted transaction, a 9,995-square-foot building at 149-151 E. 78th St.—a.k.a., the Ackerman Institute for the Family building—has sold for $18.3 million. An anonymous developer was the buyer of the five-story, 32-foot-wide townhouse located between Lexington and Third avenues, a site with additional air rights and a total buildable square footage of approximately 23,661 square feet.
“This is a very unique situation in which you have a not-for-profit entity that has an endowment and an annual operations budget but it wasn't equipped to buy new space before closing on its old location,” Eastern Consolidated director Marion Jones tells GlobeSt.com. “This was a catch-22 because they needed some of the proceeds from the sale to buy and renovate the new space.”
Jones represented the seller, along with Ben Tapper, senior director Eastern's Brian Ezratty, vice chairman and principal, procured the buyer. Attorney Joshua Bernstein, of Vandenberg Feliu represented the seller, while Stephen Rabinowitz of Greenburg Traurig provided legal representation for the buyer.
To tackle Ackerman's issue, Jones says, “we arranged a highly unusual structure in which the buyer agreed to give Ackerman a 45% releasable deposit. Even more unusual, it was established that the deposit could be released from escrow for the purchase of a new space. That allowed the institute the ability to move forward.” Adds Ezratty, “An alternative structure—such as a sale leaseback—would have incurred property taxes from which the non-profit was exempt.”
In another unusual move, she notes, “the buyer gave Ackerman a 12 month close, which allowed the institute to buy the new space, but wait to move until August because the center's schedule is consistent with the academic calendar. I doubt I'll ever see this again in my career.”
Ackerman has purchased—and moved into—an office condominium at 936 Broadway for $7.7 million. The new space expands the organization's space to approximately 13,000 square feet; its old location spanned about 10,000 square feet. “Ackerman does therapy as well as lectures and there's a post-graduate program for which it needed classrooms and an auditorium, so it makes sense for it to take some extra space for operations.”
The property is close to the 77th Street '6' train station and is three blocks away from Central Park. It also is close to many cultural institutions and retail districts along Madison and Fifth avenues.
The deal comes on the heels of several other nonprofit transactions completed by Eastern Consolidated in recent months. The firm's not-for-profit services group, headed by Eastern's chairman and CEO Peter Hauspurg, has done deals for a wide variety of organizations, including the sale of a $44 million development site to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center at 1133 York Ave.; a $39 million sale of a 24-unit package of luxury apartments at 515 E. 72nd St. to the hospital; a $39.5 million office transaction for the New School at 84 William St.; a $31 million deal for the Union of American Hebrew Congregations at 838 Fifth Avenue and a $31 million sale for Glad Tidings Church at 325 W. 33rd Street.
The group also recently worked with the Jehovah's Witnesses—the Watchtower Bible & Trust Society of New York; the Xavier School for the Blind and the Free Synagogue of Flushing. Additionally, the team is currently acting on behalf of Center for Fiction, a literary non-profit in Midtown Manhattan, in the sale of its headquarters building at 17 E. 47th St. and in the group's acquisition of a new space in Lower Manhattan.
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Rayna Katz
Rayna Katz is a seasoned business journalist whose extensive experience includes coverage of the lodging sector, travel and the culinary space. She was most recently content director for a business-to-business publisher, overseeing four publications. While at Meeting News, a travel trade publication, she received a Best Reporting award for a story on meeting cancellations in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
