In early 2011, in the depths of New York City’s housing bust, a Garden City-based real estate firm operating under the name “Bolla Em Realty, LLC” picked up a Mobil gas station at 619 Coney Island Avenue, in a part of Flatbush often called Ditmas Park by brokers and other seeking to elevate the tenor of the neighborhood. They paid just $499,000 for the property, or just under $15 per buildable square foot for a site zoned for nearly 34,000 square feet of development in a building that could rise 70 feet into the air.
Now, four years later, the entity behind Bolla Em Realty is looking to cash out – to the tune of $5.95 million, or a whopping 12 times what they paid for the land in 2011.
That’s the asking price the sellers are seeking according to a for-sale notice by CPEX Real Estate, the firm marketing the site at 619 Coney Island Avenue, which takes up the whole eastern block front of the street between Matthews Court and Slocum Place, a few short blocks from Beverly Road.
While 34,000 square feet of development rights is nothing to sneeze at, the site isn’t even that close to prime Ditmas Park. Instead, it sits on the far western edge of Flatbush, on the somewhat unpleasant Coney Island Avenue, about half a mile walking distance from either the Beverly Road or Cortelyou Road Q stations.
Furthermore, the site will, for the foreseeable future, look out onto a low-rise strip on the other side of Coney Island Avenue that’s dominated by auto-oriented businesses, due to the suburban-style strip retail C8-2 zoning designation (a bit like the Gowanus side of Fourth Avenue to the northwest).
But with housing costs rising and land costs exploding, the $176 a foot that the seller is asking is not absurd, and we would be surprised if it doesn’t sell for close to the ask.
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