Hawkins Way's Loeb Hall buy prices dorms at $192,000 a bed

Hawkins Way Capital has paid the New School $51.5 million for Loeb Hall, a 268-bed residence hall at 131-135 East 12th Street near Union Square, according to city records made public Tuesday and reported by Commercial Observer. The building was dropped from the New School's undergraduate housing options this year, making it more decommissioned asset than operating dormitory, and the purchase is Hawkins' third Manhattan student-housing acquisition in recent months and the second time the New School has sold a residence property to the same Beverly Hills firm.

The buyer took title through the entity 135 E 12th Owner, with Joshua Bird, Hawkins' managing director and general counsel, signing for the purchaser and New School chief financial officer Loretta Ferrari for the seller. The records do not identify a broker, and spokespeople for both sides did not respond to requests for comment, Commercial Observer noted. The New School's reason for pulling Loeb Hall from service is not stated, though the building sits four blocks east of the University Center on Fifth Avenue, a campus that already has numerous sites near Union Square.

The deal extends a rapid summer run: in June, Hawkins paid $80 million for the Stratford Residence Hall on the Upper West Side from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, and $28 million for an East Village building at 81 East Third Street that combines New York Conservatory for Dramatic Arts student housing with market-rate apartments; in July 2024, it paid $30 million for 122 units of New School student housing at 300 West 20th Street in Chelsea. Loeb Hall thus marks the second time the same university sat on the other side of the table.

Commercial Observer, citing the trade publication Capdex, says the purchases look like pieces of a larger plan: Hawkins, with joint venture partner Varde Partners, is assembling a portfolio of Manhattan student housing under the name Found Study. Neither firm has described the strategy publicly beyond Capdex's report, but the deal cadence supplies its own logic. Four buildings in roughly two years, two of them from the same university, give the portfolio the thing student-housing investors rarely get: a private set of comps for a niche that trades infrequently.

At $51.5 million for 268 beds, Hawkins paid roughly $192,000 a bed, not a number a buyer pays for current dormitory cash flow from a building the seller has already taken out of its housing rotation. The more likely support is the site itself: a full residence hall four blocks from the university's main center, with the kind of scale that does not come up often in Manhattan, plus whatever repositioning value attaches to a building whose academic use has already ended. Hawkins is buying optionality and setting comps as much as it is buying rent.

The New School has not explained its housing strategy, but its actions are plain: it sold the Chelsea building in 2024, pulled Loeb Hall from undergraduate options this year, and sold that too. Universities do not regularly turn themselves into a supply source for private student-housing sponsors, yet the New School has now accepted Hawkins' price twice, handing a private sponsor another data point in a niche so thin that comps barely exist. The trade also fits the citywide pattern noted in this publication's August coverage: large-building sales are taking a bigger share of New York City multifamily volume as quality inventory thins. Loeb Hall is exactly the kind of institutional-grade asset that usually stays off the market for a generation.

Any owner of a dormant urban dormitory now has a number to underwrite against, and any buyer who wants Manhattan student housing has to reckon with a private sponsor willing to pay it. The next trade in this niche will be priced against Loeb Hall, whether or not Hawkins is the counterparty.