Marcus & Millichap closes $6.1M Long Island City site sale to Queens developer

Marcus & Millichap has closed the $6.1 million sale of 49-03 Fifth St., a Long Island City redevelopment site, to a Queens developer, and the brokers who marketed the 0.11-acre parcel are using the closing to argue that district land pricing has reached an all-time high. Sean Fopeano, Shaun Riney and David Cornejo of the firm's New York City office ran the marketing for a private family seller and procured the buyer, according to Connect CRE.

The parcel holds a single commercial unit, but its value sits mostly in what has not been built: roughly 10,000 square feet of unused air rights within an M1-4/R6A zoning district, which the coverage describes as offering redevelopment opportunities in a mixed-use area. Measured against the land alone, $6.1 million works out to about $1,270 a square foot of lot, by our arithmetic, and that figure only means something once you know what a buyer can put above it.

Fopeano's market read goes further: the buyer pool in Long Island City is as deep as his office has seen, developers remain bullish on both the condo and rental markets, and the limited number of remaining sites keeps pushing land pricing to what he calls all-time highs. No land index or comparable set accompanies that superlative, so it reads best as a broker describing the bidding he just ran rather than a market-wide print; a 0.11-acre lot in a Queens mixed-use district traded at $6.1 million.

PWD reported the same Fifth Street parcel on Sept. 28, when the buyer's plan was the story: more than 30 units underwritten with sellout pricing above $1,600 a square foot. The newer account does not change that picture so much as supply the pricing logic behind it, with two product types, condo and rental, supported by one land basis in a district where the brokers say sites are becoming scarce.

The pricing logic fits the build-over-buy trade. With construction starts frozen across much of the market, developers are paying for the right to build rather than for buildings that already stand, and unused air rights over an aging commercial unit become the asset being priced. A 0.11-acre lot is a small place to test that idea, though the $6.1 million is a real data point from a Queens office that closes a steady run of these small trades. The next redevelopment site to trade in the district will show whether $6.1 million was a district price or this parcel's.