Gregg Rechler, whose portfolio of commercial properties is one of the largest on Long Island, has found a taker for a smaller asset: his own apartment.
The managing partner of Rechler Equity Partners and a member of a three-generation family of developers—his brother is RXR Realty CEO Scott Rechler—has sold a five-bedroom co-op on Park Avenue for $10.5 million, according to transfer tax records.
The Upper East Side home at East 82nd Street features a living room with a decorative fireplace, a kitchen with a china closet, and a primary suite with a pair of bathrooms and two dressing rooms, its floor plan shows. Included in the sale were two storage units.
Rechler’s wife, Lisa, who is locked in a long-running divorce with her husband, based on court records, is also listed as a seller in the deal, which closed March 11. The former couple has been marketing the prewar property since June, when it hit the market at about $12 million, meaning it traded at a more than 10% discount to the initial asking price.
But the Rechlers seem to have done well in the deal, having shelled out $2.4 million for the co-op unit in 2005, tax records show.
The buyers were Jason Genrich, who last month became a partner at Paul Singer’s hedge fund company Elliott Investment Management, and his wife, Sara, an attorney, according to the register.
Focused mostly on commercial properties in Suffolk County, Rechler Equity Partners can trace its Long Island roots to 1961, when Rechler’s grandfather, William, after leaving the aluminum-furniture business, snapped up a 1,200-acre parcel and turned it into the Hauppauge Industrial Park.
In 1995 the Plainview-based company went public, becoming one of the largest real estate investment trusts in the region. But it reversed gears in a sense in 2003, at a point when the company controlled 20 million square feet, and spun off its Long Island properties into a new privately held entity, Rechler Equity, which has about 7 million square feet today.
Four years after that restructuring, SL Green Realty Corp. acquired another wing of the family business, Reckson Associates Realty Corp., in a $6 billion deal that handed SL Green six Manhattan office towers, including 919 Third Ave., 810 Seventh Ave. and 120 W. 45th St.
Gregg Rechler, who shares leadership duties at Rechler Equity with his cousin Mitchell Rechler, has been in sales mode on the business front as well. This month his firm listed the Hamptons Business District, a five-year-old, 5-acre industrial park in Westhampton Beach that is 94% leased and has Amazon as a tenant, according to The Real Deal. If the property sells for around $200 million as expected, the deal would apparently nab a Long Island industrial sales record.
RXR, meanwhile, this winter was hit with a foreclosure suit over one of its prized holdings, Midtown’s Helmsley Building, whose $670 million mortgage is allegedly in default.
Juliette Janssens, one of the Sotheby’s International Realty agents who handled Rechler’s apartment sale, did not return an email for comment by press time.
