Vaja's $26M Astoria parcel is a bet on zoning

Moses Freund's Vaja Group has paid $26.39 million for the one-story former Staples at 24-41 31st Street, adding another piece to its Astoria 31st Street position in a deal first reported by Commercial Observer and announced by broker IPRG. The 29,638-square-foot parcel carries nearly 150,000 buildable square feet, enough for 108 units, 14,000 square feet of potential retail space, and parking, according to Donal Flaherty of IPRG, who represented Vaja; Modern Spaces' Evan Daniel represented seller 2441 Astoria Associates.

Across 24th Road sits the Neptune Diner site, which Vaja bought in 2025 for $11 million per city records and has since demolished; Flaherty arranged that sale as well. Both acquisitions run on the 31st Street-Hoyt Avenue rezoning the city adopted in 2022, which opened the corridor to mixed-use development.

Set against Vaja's other Astoria position, the former Staples site looks like the cheap half. The $26.39 million across nearly 150,000 buildable square feet works out to roughly $176 a buildable foot and about $244,000 per permitted unit, while the 152-unit project at 11-14 35th Avenue drew $84 million in bridge financing earlier this year, about $553,000 a door of debt before any equity or construction draws. The dollars that decide whether 31st Street gets built are construction dollars, and no construction debt on this parcel has been described.

Flaherty's pitch ran on scarcity: "Scale is the hardest thing to find in Astoria," he said in a statement. "You can buy a lot, but you can't buy a full block with 443 feet of frontage and entitlements already in hand." That is a description of an assembled position inside a newly legal envelope, not the neighborhood's rent roll.

The seller, 2441 Astoria Associates, is part of the project team that applied in 2021 to rezone and redevelop the larger 31st Street site, per New York YIMBY, alongside MDM Development Group and 31 Neptune; the entity selling into the corridor is one of the entities that asked the city to make it buildable. The rezoning's authors are taking the land margin while a buyer carries the construction margin, a division of labor the numbers do not argue against.

As this publication has argued, New York buyers in regulated asset classes are bidding on regulation as much as on square feet, the logic that had medical office purchasers paying for licenses alongside floor area; in Astoria, someone has to underwrite a zoning envelope before anyone underwrites a rent roll. At $176 a buildable foot the wager is defensible, and it is a corridor bet as much as a site bet: Vaja holds three positions on or near 31st Street, one a demolished diner, with $84 million of bridge paper already working elsewhere in the borough and no groundbreaking reported on any of the three.

Watch for a construction loan on 24-41 31st Street. That filing, whenever it comes, is what turns the 2022 rezoning into floor area.