From left: Galleria’s Mickey Roth, Urban Sanctuary’s Isaac Krispin and 160 Pearl StreetIt may be less than a year old, but Mickey Roth’s residential sales brokerage the Galleria Group is merging with Urban Sanctuary, The Real Deal has learned, to create a larger and more competitive firm, both company heads said.
The merger is a recent idea, said Isaac Krispin, president of Urban Sanctuary, and follows from the two firms working together on some recent resales in Midtown. No money will change hands in the deal, Krispin said, which is slated to be finalized in the next month or so.
Galleria, founded in 2010 by Roth, hot off the heels of his departure from Prudential Douglas Elliman and a short stint at Park River Properties, which he co-founded, now has seven agents and works out of a “small” seven-person office at 115 East 57th Street, Roth said. Urban Sanctuary has around 30 agents and two offices — at 160 Pearl Street and 37 East 28th Street. All of the current agents at both firms will be retained in the merger and Krispin expects to hire around 10 to 20 new agents. [more]

At left: Gaia managing partners Amir Yerushalmi and Danny Friedman and Park River Properties’ Lenny Sporn and Mickey Roth at their new office opening. At right: Lenny Sporn with Rabbi Yishayahu Yosef Pinto at the office.

It’s been less than three months since Prudential Douglas Elliman powerbrokers Mickey Roth and Lenny Sporn departed the firm to start their own venture, but the Roth-Sporn brand appears to be holding strong, even under their new company name, Park River Properties.

The freshly-minted firm, which organizes foreign buyers into purchase groups for bulk deals in new development condominiums in New York City, is planning a slew of international outposts for its forthcoming expansion. In addition to the existing Park River office in Tel Aviv, Israel, a branch is coming to Rome next month, Sporn said. He is hoping to open a total of five new overseas offices over the course of the year, and is eyeing Japan and India for two of them.

Park River, which launched in December as part of one-year-old Gaia Real Estate, a distressed investment firm, also moved into a permanent U.S. headquarters this week with Gaia and Gaia’s latest acquisition, Vision Property Management, at the Carnegie Hall Tower at 152 West 57th Street. Park River currently employs 15 agents in New York and also has plans to open two more Manhattan branches over the next six months. [more]

After testing the waters with a few individual apartments, Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Lenny Sporn and Mickey Roth have listed all of the remaining sponsor units in 370 East 76th Street as a $26 million bulk purchase. The package includes 55 units totaling 48,355 square feet, Roth said. He said both the individual units and the package, which became available last week, have seen interest. Several current tenants of the 366-unit co-op are considering putting their units on the market as part of the package, Roth said, and others are interested in buying additional units in the building, owned by East 76th LLC. [more]