OLD BETHPAGE, NY—The Association for a Better Long Island and the Commercial Industrial Brokers Society have presented the Long Island real industry's most-prestigious awards.

The Most Ingenious Deal of the Year Award was presented to a team of Newmark Grubb Knight Frank brokers for the sale of 600 Community Dr. in Manhasset to a Massachusetts-based real estate developer which then leased the 252,000-square-foot office building to North Shore-LIJ Health System. The NGKF team included vice chairman Brian Waterman, managing directors Scott Berfas and Dan Oliver as well as associate director Jordan Oliver.

North Shore subsequently signed a 32-year lease with Waterstone Development Group for the building on nine acres adjacent to its 58-acre North Shore University Hospital. Waterstone purchased the building for about $59 million—a price that is approximately equal to the mortgage debt on the property—from the Carlton Group. As part of the transaction, Waterstone agreed to invest $44 million to upgrade and modernize the building.

The Developer of the Year Award was presented to Tritec Real Estate Co. for its New Village, a mixed-used project, in Patchogue.

The awards were announced April 16 at the annual gala dinner of the ABLI and   CIBS, which brought together hundreds of Long Island regional real estate industry leaders and professionals at Carlyle on the Green in Old Bethpage State Park.

Tritec's $112 million New Village at Patchogue project began with the assemblage of six parcels totaling 3.8 acres at Patchogue's Four Corners in 2007. The developer then worked with village officials to reconfigure a 2-acre municipal parking lot through the use of property swaps and to develop an overlay-zoning district. The developer also received state and county incentives, moved a turn-of-the-century Carnegie Library building by almost half a mile, moved all aboveground utilities below ground and designed, permitted and constructed 291 rental apartments, 45,000 square-feet-of retail space and 18,000 square feet of offices. The project, completed last year, now is 60 percent rented with full occupancy expected this summer.

“Four projects were considered for this year's award, however Tritec's Patchogue project was the most transformative,” says CIBS president David Chinitz. “It demonstrated how private developers and municipalities are able to work together to get Long Island moving in the right direction.”