From left: Rockrose Development principals Henry and Justin Elghanayan and an early rendering of 43-10 Crescent StreetWhile TF Cornerstone has been busy building residential towers on the Long Island City waterfront since it split from Rockrose Development in 2009, the New York Times reported Rockrose Development is just now starting construction on its first project without brothers Tom and Fred Elghanayan further inland in the Court Square area of Long Island City.

The project is a 42-story, 709-unit rental building called Linc LIC at 43-10 Crescent Street that’s expected to be complete in 2013. Rents will be $38 per square foot, about 25 percent below what a comparable Manhattan development would command, according to Rockrose, and similar to other new rental developments in the area. [more]

From left to right: Justin Elghanayan, Jed Walentas, Andrew Sciame, Samantha Rudin, Raphael De Niro and Benjamin Levine

From the January issue: Signs of improvement appeared at the end of the year, but 2009 will be remembered for its epic real estate downturn. In response to the maelstrom of hard times, many longtime industry veterans took the opportunity to scale back their activities rather than tackling what promise to be several more difficult years. For example, Brown Harris Stevens announced plans to take over the 28-year-old Upper East Side boutique firm started by Edward Lee Cave, a fixture of the high-end brokerage scene. And Douglas Durst stepped down as co-president of the Durst Organization, after describing his day-to-day duties as “exhausting.” (He’ll remain chairman). But as some industry leaders recede, new opportunities are being created for young players, new ideas, new buyers and innovative business models. This month, The Real Deal looked at the next generation of New York City real estate, from the people poised to reshape the industry to the strategies that will help them do it. We looked at how the offspring of some of the city’s most established real estate families — including Ivanka Trump, Jed Walentas, Justin Elghanayan and Jamie and Harrison LeFrak — are handling the downturn. Because many old real estate families were conservative during the boom and avoided overleveraging, observers say their sons and daughters are uniquely positioned to profit from distressed opportunities.  More

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From left: K. Thomas Elghanayan and brother Frederick started TF Cornerstone

Now that the division of Rockrose has been finalized, the two younger Elghanayan brothers are looking to snap up distressed assets. “Our plan is to look for properties that are in some form of incomplete state,” K. Thomas Elghanayan, who with his brother Frederick is now doing business under the name TF Cornerstone, told The Real Deal.
“We can take something that’s half-built and we can finish it, manage
it, rent it out, sell it, and do whatever we need to do. We’re looking
at a couple of opportunities like that, where we’d be buying these
[properties] from financial institutions.” In fact, he said, TF (for Thomas and Frederick) Cornerstone is close to making a deal on two properties in the New York metro area: one is a “broken condo,” and another is a development deal where construction started and stopped. [more]