Owner seeks $75M for dev site near Amazon’s Midtown office

Falcon Properties hopes tech giant’s arrival will boost value of Sixth Ave buildings

Falcon Properties' Florencia Masri and 1030 Sixth Avenue (Falcon Properties, Google Maps, Getty)
Falcon Properties' Florencia Masri and 1030 Sixth Avenue (Falcon Properties, Google Maps, Getty)

The owner of a handful of aging buildings a block south of Bryant Park is hoping a new neighbor’s imminent arrival will help it secure a windfall.

Falcon Properties is looking to sell a group of properties from 1024 to 1032 Sixth Avenue for around $75 million, sources told The Real Deal, marketing the parcel as a development site in close proximity to a large Midtown office Amazon plans to open next year.

The property sits at the corner of Sixth Avenue and West 39th Street, on the same block as Fifth Avenue’s Lord & Taylor Building, which Amazon bought from WeWork for nearly $1 billion in 2020.

A new owner could develop a residential condo building with up to 260,000 square feet of space, including zoning bonuses. The site is also zoned for commercial use.

Falcon is a family firm headed by president Florencia Masri, whose late father, Elias Masri, managed real estate in Buenos Aires before moving to the United States in the 1970s and buying up Garment District properties.

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Florencia Masri said the company had been thinking about redeveloping the Sixth Avenue properties before her father died in 2020, but eventually realized it was time to put the site up for sale.

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The property is being marketed by Eastdil Secured, using the address 1030 Avenue of the Americas.

Property owners often salivate when a big tech firm moves into the neighborhood, because employees tend to want to live close to where they work.

Google’s offices in the Meatpacking District have drawn employees to rent and buy in the area. And when Amazon in 2018 announced plans to open a headquarters in Long Island City (plans which it later scuttled), speculators started buying homes in the Queens neighborhood.