A forthcoming commercial development project from Vorea Group in Long Island City will be home to iFLY’s first indoor skydiving facility in New York City.
The indoor skydiving company signed a 20-year lease for about 10,000 square feet across two floors at 10-04 Borden Avenue in Queens. The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Igloo, the commercial leasing arm of Vorea, brokered the deal.
iFLY will occupy about 6,800 square feet of retail on the building’s first two floors, as well as about 3,200 square feet of mechanical space. The agreement makes iFLY the retail anchor for the project.
iFLY’s space is expected to be completed by next year with the remainder of the building slated to be finished by the end of 2023. When finished, the building will encompass 50,000 square feet across three floors, as well as 6,000 square feet of outdoor space. Vorea is still fielding other tenants for the project.
10-04 Borden Avenue’s proximity to the Long Island City waterfront and Queens-Midtown Tunnel was what attracted iFLY to the space, Vorea’s Head of Business Development Adam Joly said.
“The site is on display to more than 60 million cars between the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and the Pulaski Bridge that connects you to Brooklyn. So it was really a flagship for [iFLY] and they felt that site was the spot to make a presence in New York,” Joly said.
iFLY also explored locations in Manhattan, Brooklyn and other sites in Queens, Joly said. The indoor skydiving company already has two suburban facilities in Yonkers and Paramus.
10-04 Borden Avenue is being developed by Borden Ave Op Zone, a joint venture between Vorea and Andru Coren. The mixed-use project was formerly the site of a commuter parking lot at the intersection of Borden Avenue, Jackson Avenue and Vernon Boulevard.
The forthcoming project will be Vorea’s latest mixed-use commercial development in what the real estate firm calls the “LIC Triangle” — an area defined as south of the Queensboro Bridge and west of the Sunnyside rail yards. Companies such as Compass, Charter Spectrum, The New York Times and Sonder are among those who have signed on for space within Vorea’s Long Island City campus since 2019.
Vorea is part of a joint venture of real estate developers who closed in September on an $88 million a 12-story, mixed-use property in Long Island City. The project takes up a full block front along 5th Street between 49th and 50th avenues near the waterfront.
The developers broke ground on the project in January with a $220 million loan. When completed, the 484,000-square-foot property will offer close to 500 residential units and 40,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and community facilities. About 30 percent of the apartments will be set aside as income-restricted under the Affordable New York Program. The project is expected to be completed by October 2024.
With about 7,500 residential units slated to open up in Long Island City by 2025, Joly said that Vorea’s commercial development is built to benefit from the influx of residents.
“I think the residential is such an easy bet at this point,” Joly said. “All of the data is there. The proof is there. The product exists. The institutional capital has flooded this market and now it’s like, ‘How do we create a sustainable ecosystem?’”
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