From left: Marcus & Millichap’s Adelaide Polsinelli and 100 Orchard Street

A 22-room hotel on the Lower East Side is on the market, the Wall Street Journal reported, but a buyer will have to take an unusual factor into account when he or she makes an offer. The hotel doubles as a historical time capsule.

Randy Settenbrino bought the Blue Moon Hotel at 100 Orchard Street between Delancey and Broome streets for $1.24 million in two separate deals in 1997 and 2000, after spending years selling Italian menswear out of the storefront that now comprises the hotel lobby.

Before gutting the interior, Settenbrino entered the 15 tenement apartments above to find that many of them had been unoccupied and untouched since 1936. [more]

From left: David Simone, Marco Lala and Kenneth Krasnow

After nearly seven years in the Manhattan office of Massey Knakal Realty Services, David Simone said that he’s left the firm to start Yellow Brick Realty, which will focus exclusively on commercial sales in the Bronx and Northern Manhattan in the near-term.
During his tenure with Massey Knakal, and his two and a half years with Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services before that, Simone said he brokered more than 100 deals in the Bronx and believed the time had come for him to do something on his own and something specific to the Bronx and Upper Manhattan. [more]

Despite a projected 1,160 apartment units set to hit the Brooklyn market in 2010, the vacancy rate in the borough will stay relatively the same, according to the first-quarter market report from Marcus &amp; Millichap. Apartment vacancy is set to hit 2.6 percent in 2010, according to the report, up just 0.2 percent from the current vacancy rate, despite the abundance of inventory that will enter the market. This prediction comes on the heels of improvement, price-wise, among apartments over the last year. The median price increased 8 percent to $117,360 year-over-year. <i>TRD</i> [more]

Robert Scarano and Olive Park

Scarano redesigns Williamsburg condo: Scarano
Architects has helped bring the condominium Olive Park, at 100 Maspeth
Avenue in Williamsburg, up to code and ready for sales, according to a release from the architectural firm. The firm
designed colonnades along the perimeters of the building to create the
15-foot setback required by the New York City Planning Commission. The
original design by another architect called for a straight wall
parallel to the sidewalk with no setback. “We were brought in as
trouble shooters, shortly after the building had been framed out and
City Planning had made its decision to halt construction,” said Robert Scarano. “Our goal was to help the
developer complete the project without having to start from the very
beginning, which would have been cost prohibitive.” TRD [more]