Holterbosch warehouse fetches $95M, pricing the land, not the lease

The Holterbosch family has sold a Long Island City warehouse at 10-01 45th Road for $95 million to Ground Lease REIT, an affiliate of Montgomery Street Partners, which bought the property on the Queens waterfront. The price comes from a deed filing made public Thursday, after Commercial Observer first reported the sale.

The family had held the site since about 1968, through the years when Hans Holterbosch Inc. ranked among the major importers and distributors of Lowenbrau beer, and past the death of H. Dieter Holterbosch in 2016 at 95; his daughter Heidi signed the deed transfer. A decade between a patriarch's death and a family's exit is an estate running on its own clock, the reason legacy industrial parcels so often reach the market on the estate's schedule rather than the cycle's.

The buyer's name points at ground leases and the deed at fee title; Ground Lease REIT now owns a warehouse a few feet from the Eleventh Street Basin inlet, on a stretch of Vernon Boulevard described as mid-transformation, with development potential flagged as the neighborhood keeps turning over. Until a rent roll or a rezoning says otherwise, the property is land with a warehouse attached, the income a placeholder and the parcel the position.

The family has priced Long Island City land before, and higher. In 2017, Heidi Holterbosch sought a buyer for an 8-acre Newtown Creek site at 55-01 Second Street, which the city had rezoned residential as it prepared for the Hunters Point South redevelopment; the listing asked $350 million, and TF Cornerstone eventually razed the site in 2021 to build housing. Eight acres against a parcel of unstated size is no like-for-like comparison, but it shows what the family believed its land was worth once the zoning changed and frames the $95 million as an industrial number rather than a residual-land number.

The underwriting is missing: no broker is identified, no square footage is given for the building, and it is not clear whether Hans Holterbosch Inc. is still an active company. Without that figure, there is no per-foot comp to carry to the next Vernon Boulevard trade, only a headline price for a waterfront block whose highest use is still being argued.

Ground Lease REIT paid $95 million for the deed, and what it does with the air above the warehouse will decide whether that money bought a warehouse or a zoning position.