OLD BETHPAGE, NY The Association for a Better Long Island (ABLI) and the Commercial Industrial Brokers Society (CIBS) held their annual awards ceremony on April 18th.
The Most Ingenious Deal of the Year Award was presented to a team of brokers at Colliers International, for arranging the sale of the former 272,000 s/f Pall Corp. headquarters at 25 Harbor Park Dr. in Port Washington to Kiss Nail Products Inc. Pall was sold to Danaher Corp. in 2015.
Gus Nuzzolese, Darren Leiderman, Jason Maietta and Ken Enos, all of Colliers Long Island, brokered the sale to Kiss along with Connor Fought of Collier’s Washington, D.C., office and Jeff Wagner of Collier’s Chicago office. As part of the $30 million transaction Pall agreed to lease back 90,000 s/f. The project received economic benefits from the Nassau County IDA. The building, which once housed Pall’s administrative and laboratory operations, was designed by Woodbury-based Spector Group and features 35-ft. ceilings, glass-walled class A offices, a café and galleries lit by skylights. Pall put the property on the market in April 2016.
The biggest obstacle to the sale was that the Pall facility never was seen as multi-tenant building, especially with its laboratories. With the assistance of JRS Architect, the Colliers team devised a plan to convert the property to a multi-tenant office building while maintaining millions of dollars of filtration systems. Pall received offers from various developers and agreed to a sale to one of them, but that buyer wavered before the transaction closed. Kiss, another prospective buyer, did not want to use the building as a renovated office/laboratory and, instead, wanted to convert the building back to a manufacturing/warehouse facility with some office. The Colliers team then devised a plan to move Pall’s office space to an area contiguous to its labs, and create a building within a building for them.
The Developer of the Year Award was presented to Rechler Equity Partners for its $250 million redevelopment of a former residential trailer park in North Amityville into Greybarn Amityville. The 20-acre Greybarn complex is one of the largest rental developments in the town of Babylon with 500 one and two-bedroom apartments and 32,000 s/f of retail space — including a Starbucks — along Rte. 110 just south of the Southern State Pkwy. Greybarn includes a fitness center, screening room and communal spaces as well as outdoor facilities. Phase 1 and 2 of the project, 205 rental units, have been completed and Phase 3 (120 apartments) is due to be completed this summer. Rechler acquired the trailer park, which was in condemnation proceedings, in 2009. One of the biggest challenges was moving the park’s tenants. The town and the developer negotiated a relocation expense package of up to $20,000 for the former trailer park residents. Rechler began a five phase redevelopment of the property in 2015 with the first 139 apartments and retail space competed in 2017.
The awards were presented at the annual gala dinner of the ABLI and CIBS, which brought together hundreds of Long Island regional real estate industry leaders and professionals at the Heritage Club in Old Bethpage State Park.
CIBS was formed in 1992 out of the shared belief among the region’s leading brokers that the region needed a unified voice to advocate on behalf of professionalism, ethics and industry cohesion. Today, CIBS is a leading voice and advocate for commercial development in the Long Island market. Since its formation, CIBS has helped upgrade the industry by offering hundreds of educational programs, seminars and presentations; advocated professional standards and offered grievance resolution; provided informal mentoring relationships; raised tens of thousands of dollars for local charities; and created social settings in which colleagues have become friends, and competitors respected peers. For information about the Commercial Industrial Brokers Society of Long Island visit www.cibs-li.com
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