L&L MAG, the new real estate development firm launched earlier this year by MaryAnne Gilmartin with L&L Holding Company founders David Levinson and Robert Lapidus, announced its first ground up development deal this week.
The firm will build a 460-unit residential rental building at 241 West 28th Street in Chelsea.
The project will be developed under the Affordable NY program with 30 percent of its units reserved for low- and middle-income New Yorkers. COOKFOX has been selected to design the building. Construction is expected to begin in 2019.
L&L MAG structured a 99-year ground-lease for the site, a block-through parking lot owned and operated by Edison Properties and will be building a public parking garage for Edison as part of the new development.
L&L MAG is partnering with Atalaya Capital Management and Qualitas, one of the biggest asset managers in Australia, for which 241 West 28th Street will be their first US-based investment.
The company declined to comment on the value of the deal. The Real Deal reported sources who put it at $150 to $170 million.
L&L MAG CEO MaryAnne Gilmartin, said, “We brought together the perfect team for this project – Atalaya and Qualitas – and have shown we can advance the most complex deals in a very short period of time. We are going to pursue a diverse set of projects across sectors and expect this will be the first of many.”
“We are thrilled to establish a co-GP relationship with L&L MAG and partner with one of Australia’s most renowned institutional investors in the multifamily space. Atalaya looks forward to partnering together on many successful transactions to come,” said Young Kwon, Atalaya’s Head of Real Estate.
“Our business is well established in managing the capital of global investors in our home markets, however we identified that our domestic Australian investor base could not easily access the type of blue-chip opportunities that MaryAnne and her team can generate in a gateway city such as New York,” said Mark Fischer, co-founder and Managing Director of Principal Investments at Qualitas.
“This first investment with L&L MAG and the opening of our New York office will serve as a platform for Qualitas to deliver a pipeline of compelling opportunities to our domestic investors. The opportunity to provide exposure to a Class A multifamily asset, in a neighborhood such as Chelsea, does not come along often.”
The Cushman & Wakefield team of Steve Kohn, Alex Hernandez and Alex Lapidus represented L&L MAG in arranging the joint ventures with Atalaya and Qualitas.
Susi Yu and Jeff Rosen, Managing Directors at L&L MAG, led the deal with support from the rest of the founding team, Adam Greene and Ashley Cotton. Steve Kohn, Cushman & Wakefield, represented L&L MAG on the equity transaction.
