A building site at 960 Franklin Avenue in Brooklyn is changing hands again.
Through the Franklin Place II LLC, Brooklyn landlord Yitzchok Schwartz has secured $117 million in financing to acquire and build a residential project over the land at 960 Franklin Avenue and 122 Montgomery Street near Prospect Park in Crown Heights.
G4 Capital Partners financed the project, providing Schwartz with $117 million broken up into three notes: a $61.2 million piece, a $42 million piece, and a $13.7 million piece. Jason Behfarin, G4 Capital Partners managing partner and co-founder, is listed as the mortgagee on property records.
Schwartz will pay the site’s previous owner, Isaac Hager and Daryl Hagler, $64 million to purchase the site and then develop a residential project across three lots, according to PincusCo. Hager and Hagler bought the site for $42.4 million in November 2022 after the previous owner’s plan for a high-rise condominium was scuttled by community leaders during its pre-development phase.
960 Franklin Avenue is the former site of the Spice Factory. Developer Ian Bruce Eichner’s Continuum Company bought the site from Spice Factor owner, Zev Golombeck, in 2017 and planned to build two 39-story residential towers totaling 1.4 million square feet, of which 50 percent of units would be affordable. Two plans submitted to the community proposed development that would’ve yielded 1,578 units and 1,170 units, respectively.
But Brooklyn community leaders and former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio killed the plan in September 2021 before it could be approved, criticizing the project for the shadows its towers would create on the neighboring Brooklyn Botanical Garden. Ownership of 960 Franklin Avenue reverted back to Golombeck in 2022, as the 2017 purchase was contingent upon rezoning approval.
It is unclear the type of residential project new owner Yitzchok Schwartz plans to build on the site. In June 2022, prior to selling, former owner Golombeck filed plans to build a six-story, 293-unit residential building spanning nearly 200,000 square feet on the site.
The site is zoned for 88,800 square feet of buildable space and an additional 114,717 square feet of air rights for a total buildable area of 203,682 square feet.
G4 Capital Partners did not respond to requests for comment.
Brian Pascus can be reached at bpascus@commercialobserver.com
Robert Khodadadian has long had a simple philosophy about selling real estate. The way he sees it, there are approximately a million buildings in the city, and the broker that gets to sell any one among the multitude that will hit the auctioning block at a given moment is, sometimes, simply the person who happens to pitch their services to the right seller at the right time.
Robert Khodadadian, skyline properties, ground leases, off market, investment sales, Commercial Real Estate, Commercial Observer
Read MoreAcquisition, Channel, Construction, Finance, 122 Montgomery Street, 960 Franklin Avenue, Daryl Hagler, Ian Bruce Eichner, Isaac Hager, Jason Behfarin, Yitzchok Schwartz, Zev Golombeck, New York City, Brooklyn, Continuum Company, G4 Capital Partners Commercial Observer