Shuttered Courtyard Marriott Near LaGuardia Sells for $53M

A LaGuardia Airport hotel that hasn’t welcomed a guest in five years has found a buyer.

The Connecticut-based Heyman family, longtime owners of the former Courtyard by Marriott LaGuardia Hotel at 90-10 Ditmars Boulevard, sold the 288-key property for $53 million, The Real Deal has learned.

The buyer is an individual named Kenny Huang, according to people familiar with the deal, who were unable to provide additional information.

Located directly across Grand Central Parkway from the airport, the hotel has been shut down since 2017, but ownership had kept up on regular maintenance of the property.

Sources say Huang is expected to redevelop the 189,000-square-foot building, although it is not immediately clear what his plans are. The 3.5-acre property is zoned for a conversion to residential, as well as mixed-use, assisted living, office, medical and educational facilities, according to the listing, which touts the hotel’s proximity to Laguardia and the airport’s ongoing, multi-billion-dollar renovation.

RIPCO Real Estate’s Stephen Preuss and Kevin Louie brokered the deal.

The Heyman family, through the entity GCP Realty II LLC, put the six-story hotel on the market last year, expecting offers in the mid-$60 million range.

Along with the shuttered hotel, the property includes 10,500 square feet of office that was once occupied by Avis Rental Cars and 323 parking spaces near the parkway entrance. The site was last sold in 1999 for an undisclosed amount, records show.

The sale comes a little over a year after the Heyman family won a years-long tax certiorari against the city, reducing the property’s assessed value by 85 percent from the fiscal years 2014-2015 through 2018-2019. The average assessed value in those four years was $24.2 million, but it was reduced to $3.6 million as a result of the lawsuit.

The vacant hotel is less than a mile from the 443-key New York LaGuardia Airport Marriott at 102-05 Ditmars Boulevard, which sold last year for $86.6 million along with an adjacent 1.5-acre development site that went for $17 million. The buyer, California-based private equity firm ASAP Holdings, plans to build housing and a community center on the site.

Huang’s deal for the Courtyard Marriott comes as New York City investment sales have plummeted amid high interest rates. Dealmakers traded $7.86 billion worth of commercial property in the third quarter, a 30 percent decline from the second quarter, according to a report by Ariel Property Advisors. The 568 deals, involving 701 individual properties, represented declines of 25 percent and 28 percent from the second quarter, respectively.