Long Island City auto-repair building sells for $6.1M with condo plan

A local developer has paid $6.1 million for the 10,000-square-foot building at 49-03 Fifth St. in Long Island City, an auto repair shop today, with plans to redevelop the site into high-end condominiums. Marcus & Millichap's Sean Fopeano, Shaun Riney and David Cornejo, who had the exclusive for a private family seller, procured the buyer, the brokerage said, without naming him beyond a local developer, and the figure worth carrying out of the deal is the $407 a buildable square foot it sets.

Divided into the $6.1 million price, that basis implies an envelope of just under 15,000 buildable feet on a 0.11-acre lot zoned M1-4/R6A, room for a mixed-use project one block from the waterfront and one block from Vernon Boulevard, with 10,000 square feet of unused air rights attached and Gantry Plaza State Park and the Long Island City train station nearby.

Fopeano said the buyer is underwriting a boutique condominium development of more than 30 high-end units and sellout pricing north of $1,600 a square foot, but set against the roughly 15,000 buildable feet that pricing implies, the plan runs small—more than 30 homes averages under 500 square feet apiece, tight for a product billed as high-end. The air rights and whatever the R6A envelope allows beyond the building standing there now may close that gap; how the units are sized and how many the zoning ultimately yields is not clear.

If the whole envelope sold at the stated pricing, gross proceeds would clear $24 million and land would sit at roughly a quarter of sellout before a dollar of construction, though the coverage publishes no pro forma, so that figure is arithmetic on two sourced numbers and moves with the unit count and the mix. What $6.1 million buys here is the right to build, a site one block off the waterfront inside an envelope that permits it, rather than a rent roll, and the underwriting only holds if the top of the Long Island City condo market holds through delivery.

Marcus & Millichap's other September closings in the record run from $9 million to $83 million, which makes this the smallest of the firm's September closings in the record, but small trades are where land comps get set. The next seller on Fifth Street will quote $407 a buildable foot, and the family that sold this one has a number to point at. As this publication has argued, a construction freeze rewards whoever already owns; this trade cuts the other way by one small lot, taking a 10,000-square-foot commercial building out of the stock and promising more than 30 homes in its place.