Magna Hospitality buys Chelsea development site for $113M

Cha-chang! Sam Chang’s McSam Hotel Group just sold a Chelsea development site for almost double what it paid for the property about a year ago.

Magna Hospitality Group paid Chang’s firm $113 million for 140 West 24th Street, according to city records filed on Thursday. McSam had bought the site from Extell Development for $61 million in October 2017.

Extell had acquired the two adjacent pieces of the site, occupied by two commercial buildings, in 2014 and 2017 for a total of just $18.2 million, and had filed demolition permits for the buildings a few months before the sale.

McSam had filed permits for a 45-story hotel with 510 rooms over 140,500 square feet. Gene Kaufman, the architect of the project and a frequent McSam collaborator, said the project will continue as planned.

Rhode Island-based Magna Hospitality Group, a self-described “opportunistic hotel real estate investment firm,” owns or operates more than 20 hotels across the country. Last August, the company acquired the EB-5 funded Las Olas Ocean Resort project in Fort Lauderdale Beach for $39.1 million at a bankruptcy auction.

The Chelsea hotel development is located in a M-1 light manufacturing zone, where future hotel development will soon be constrained by the city’s introduction of special permit requirement. Since the project has already begun construction, the hotel will be able to open without a special permit.

Magna Hospitality and McSam Group did not response immediately to requests for comment.