Famed Hotel Wales could be heading for a condo conversion

Is the storied Hotel Wales on the Upper East Side about to fall victim to the luxury condo craze?

The 89-room, 10-story property sold to DLJ Real Estate Capital for $35 million, property records show. The New York Post reports that Cushman & Wakefield, which had been marketing the hotel, described it as a “rare opportunity for conversion to a luxury mixed-use condo building.”

The building at 1295 Madison Avenue has 6,611 square feet of unused air rights, which can be used to build a penthouse, according to C&W.

Formerly known as the Hotel Chastiagneray, the building became a single-room-occupancy hotel before its conversion into a high-end hotel in the 1980s. Its retail tenants include the restaurants Sarabeth East and Paola’s. Two of the units remain SROs, according to the Cushman listing.

In 2015, DLJ picked up a 43-unit building in Gramercy for $34 million. A year earlier, it flipped a 12-story Brooklyn Heights rental building to Benchmark Real Estate Group for $50 million after acquiring the property for $38.5 million.  [NYP] — Konrad Putzier