Would you pay $32 million to live here? Well, someone just did.
Photo: Matthew Sedacca
Another record breaker in a moment of record breaking: A house in Gravesend went for $32 million last week, per city records, unseating the townhouse at 8 Montague Terrace as the most expensive residential sale in Brooklyn. (The Brooklyn Heights brownstone overlooking the Promenade sold in 2020 for $25.5 million.) If you find it ever so slightly surprising that a three-story house built in 2006 in a tiny corner of South Brooklyn can get that much — welcome to Gravesend.
The 10,086-square-foot home at 2126 East 4th Street belonged to Eli Gindi, a real-estate developer whose family founded the Century 21 department-store chain. Gindi appears to have unloaded his Beaux-Arts-ish McMansion in an off-market deal to Victor Hakim, the founder and CEO of the Choice Home Warranty firm, according to city records and PincusCo, which first reported the transaction.
For those of you unfamiliar with the financial microclimate that is the Gravesend market, the neighborhood is the epicenter for Syrian Jews in New York City and home to members of some of its wealthiest real-estate families. In a slice of the neighborhood that some members of the community described to me as its own Gold Coast — roughly between Avenues S and U and from McDonald Avenue to Ocean Parkway, where the community’s main synagogue, Shaare Zion, sits — it’s not uncommon for homes to sell for upwards of $5 million. “My joke used to be ‘I don’t associate with anyone who lives past McDonald,’” says one person whose family owns property on the coveted blocks. “When you factor in a community flush with money with a community that has a need to be within walking distance of each other, you create a perfect storm of a residential real-estate market where prices can get very silly very easily,” real-estate agent Louis Calemine, of Calemine & Co., told me earlier this year.
In July, Wharton Properties’ Jeff Sutton purchased a dinky, unassuming three-story home on East 3rd Street for $7 million, which he told Crain’s would be for family members. It was across the street from the two-story single-family home he purchased for $14 million in 2022 from members of the Chera family, another big name in the city’s retail-real-estate world. Thor Equities’ Joseph Sitt, meanwhile, bought 2016’s most expensive Brooklyn home with an $11.36 million purchase price on a 5,000-square-foot, two-story home built in 1925.
A 2006 New York Times article dug into the area’s astronomical prices, noting that a number of the seven- and eight-figure sales were ultimately for teardown jobs (with the additional construction tacking on several million dollars to the total spend). People often want the lots, not the house that sits on them. Mark Martov, a Corcoran broker who works in South Brooklyn, tells me the $32 million price tag for Gindi’s mansion probably also has something to do with the seller already having secured and combined properties on adjoining lots. “If you’ve got the money and you don’t want the headache,” Martov says, “this is the only show in town.”