Gary Barnett’s Extell Development will pay at least $149.5 million for a Lower East Side development site that until recently was home to a Pathmark supermarket, city records first spotted by the Lo-Down confirm. Extell went into contract on the site — located at 227 Cherry Street — in February, when Crain’s reported that the total sale price was $175 million.
The price includes the buyout of Pathmark’s lease for $46.5 million, city records show. And the remaining roughly $25 million could be a payment for the supermarket to vacate the space before its lease expires, Eastern Consolidated’s Adelaine Polsinelli speculated.
“Extell probably paid that to Pathmark to vacate,” said Polsinelli, who was not involved in the deal but has previously worked on the property. “They’ve been there forever.”
Extell is likely to build a luxury apartment complex at the development site, as The Real Deal reported. The site was sold by Park-It-Management, owned by the father-and-son duo of Fred and Gary Spindler.
Eastern Consolidated’s Peter Hauspurg and Brian Ezratty were the sole brokers on the deal.
“I spent two years negotiating the deal for Gary, but we only handled the land portion,” Ezratty confirmed to The Real Deal, and added that Extell’s vice president of acquisitions, Dov Hertz, handled the leasing component of the deal.
In October of last year, a spokesperson for Pathmark said that the supermarket would relinquish its long-term lease to make way for a large-scale development project.
Barnett has been pushing the pedal to the shovel of late, with more Manhattan projects in the pipeline than any other developer.
Representatives from Extell and Park-It-Management could not immediately be reached for comment. [Lo-Down] – Hiten Samtani