A six-story apartment building at the corner of East Broadway and Montgomery Street and a two-story commercial building a few blocks west have just changed hands in two separate transactions.
In the larger of the two deals, 259 E. Broadway sold to a limited liability company linked to R.A. Cohen and Associates, a real estate investment firm with an office in Midtown, according to city land records. The building had been listed by Douglas Elliman at $5.5 million but sold for only $3.5 million, according to public documents. The building, which is also known as 10-12 Montgomery St., stretches along Montgomery Street in front of a small greenspace. It contains 15 rent-controlled walk-up apartments and several commercial spaces on the ground floor, where the tenants include a Chinese takeout joint, an electronics repair shop and the Big Apple bodega. The building is also under scrutiny by the buildings department, which cited seller Shih Equities for two violations in May, both stemming from inspectors reporting that several apartments had been illegally converted into a total of 13 SROs. Hearings on the matter are pending, with the buildings department ordering the owners to undo the construction to return the building to its allowable maximum of 15 family dwellings.
In the second deal, a small building at 153 E. Broadway, near the corner of Rutgers Street, sold for $2.57 million to an entity known as K & R LLC. Its ground-floor commercial space is home to the apparently now-shuttered HK Discount store. The building has changed hands twice in less than a year; seller G & CW Realty Development just acquired it in December for $2.68 million, city records show. In June 2012, the buildings department rejected a proposal from a previous owner that would have added onto the building vertically, more than doubling its space, from 4,000 square feet to 8,400 square feet.
