Pinnacle Group sells $128M in Condos
This story has been updated.
Pinnacle Group has finalized another major sale.
The company, headed by Joel Wiener, finalized the transfer of 743 New York condo and co-op units and at least 36 parking properties for $128 million, according to deeds recorded with the city this week. The condos were transferred across 39 separate transactions.
About $66 million of the proceeds will be used to pay off lender Axos Capital, according to a statement Pinnacle’s Israeli subsidiary Zarasai Group filed with the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. About $47 million in proceeds was deposited into the account of Series C bondholders, although the company said that amount was subject to change.
The sale is a major transaction for Pinnacle Group, which most recently made headlines for auctioning off thousands of mostly rent-stabilized apartments through bankruptcy. It is also a coda on Pinnacle’s condo conversion business, which became more difficult after statewide policy changes.
Most of the condo and co-op units in the sale are located in Queens, specifically the neighborhoods of Flushing, East Flushing and Rego Park. An owner associated with Pinnacle Group sold 69 units at 132-35 Sanford Avenue in Flushing, for example, for about $12 million. That works out to less than $175,000 per unit.
Pinnacle converted the building’s 204 rent-stabilized units to condos in 2014, according to documents filed with the state attorney general’s office. At the time, Wiener projected a $119 million sellout, working out to about $580,000 per unit.
Pinnacle sold 62 units at 97-25 64th Avenue in Rego Park for $9.9 million, working out to less than $160,000 per unit. Wiener’s condo conversion of the building’s 108 units was accepted in 2022. At the time, Wiener predicted a nearly $60 million sellout, about $553,000 per unit.
Other units are located in Manhattan and Brooklyn, namely in Crown Heights and Upper Manhattan.
Converting rent-stabilized units to condos was profitable for Pinnacle before 2019, according to reporting at the time from Bloomberg.
But after state lawmakers passed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act in 2019, condo conversions became few and far between. The law required that landlords get more than half their tenants on board with a conversion and a plan to purchase. (This requirement was softened last year.)
The buyer LLCs listed property manager Bronstein Properties in their addresses. However, a spokesperson for Bronstein clarified it was not the buyer of the portfolio but the managing agent. Bronstein manages about 6,500 apartments across 120 properties in the New York area, according to its website.
A spokesperson for Pinnacle Group declined to comment.
Pinnacle made headlines earlier this year for an even larger transaction: the sale of more than 5,000 mostly rent-stabilized properties to Summit Properties at a bankruptcy auction. Tenant groups and Mayor Zohran Mamdani cast Pinnacle as a “slumlord” and tried to stop the sale to Summit. But the portfolio ultimately sold for $451 million.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Bronstein Properties was the buyer of the portfolio. It has been updated to reflect that the firm was the managing agent.
