All Year reaches deal with Rubin Schron for massive Brooklyn portfolio

Schron’s Cammeby’s agreed to restructure the landlord’s debt, allowing it to exit bankruptcy

Cammeby’s Rubin “Rubie” Schron with 165 Central Avenue, 198 Scholes Street and 11 Gunther Place (Google Maps, Apartments)
Cammeby’s Rubin “Rubie” Schron with 165 Central Avenue, 198 Scholes Street and 11 Gunther Place (Google Maps, Apartments)

UPDATED, March 21, 2022, 6:08 p.m.: Troubled landlord All Year Holdings has reached a deal to restructure its debt and sell its sprawling Brooklyn apartment portfolio to health care executive Avi Philipson’s Graph Group and Rubin Schron’s Cammeby’s International Group.

Graph — an investment firm — and Cammeby’s are set to take control of over 100 assets from the bankrupt Brooklyn landlord, which mostly consist of small apartment buildings in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Williamsburg and Bushwick. If approved, the deal would allow All Year to exit bankruptcy, according to a federal court filing.

In the deal, the joint venture will pay $60 million to All Year — $40 million in cash and $20 million in promissory notes — in exchange for 100 percent of the equity in the reorganized company.

Graph Group and Cammeby’s have agreed to assume all unsecured claims against All Year. In an affidavit submitted by its restructuring officer, All Year reported five unsecured claims, including $50.5 million to lender Downtown Capital Partners for preferred equity and mezzanine financing payments and $37.8 million to TAZ Partners, which alleged that Goldman entered a confession of judgment in its favor.

Notably, the deal does not include All Year’s stake in its most valuable asset, the William Vale hotel in Williamsburg, according to a plan submitted on the Israeli bond market. The company sold its other marquee property, The Denizen apartment complex, to Atlas Capital for $506 million in cash late last year.

Meridian Capital Group acted as the exclusive broker on the remaining portfolio. It found about 40 potential bidders and conducted more than 100 Zoom and telephone calls with potential bidders, according to the filing.

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Led by founder Yoel Goldman, All Year became one of Brooklyn’s largest landlords by tapping into cheap financing on the Israeli bond market. But the company started missing payments to bondholders in 2019, and Goldman was removed from decision making after allegations of fraud and investor disputes.

The company filed for bankruptcy in late 2021 after it claimed that Goldman was signing confessions of judgment on behalf of the company.

Philipson runs Graph Group and is also a nursing home operator who holds an ownership interest in the Cold Springs Hills Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in Woodbury, New York. His father, Bent Philipson, is a controversial nursing home operator in Long Island and throughout the country. In 2019, a judge found that a healthcare company tied to Philpson, SentosaCare, had violated human trafficking by using financial threats to prevent Filipino workers from quitting.

Cammeby’s was founded in 1967 by Schron​, a landlord and real estate investor who tried to buy the Empire State Building in 2013 with a $2 billion cash offer. The company owned at least 11,700 apartments in New York as of The Real Deal’s 2016 ranking, making it one of the five largest multifamily landlords in the city at the time.

In January it was initially named as a defendant in a lawsuit brought by survivors of the deadly fire at 333 East 181st Street — which Cammeby’s sold in 2020 along with seven other affordable housing complexes in the Bronx — but the claims brought against Cammeby’s were dismissed in early February, court filings show.

This story was updated with ownership numbers for Cammeby’s portfolio and to reflect that claims brought against Cammeby’s by survivors of the Jan. 2022 apartment fire in the Bronx were dismissed last month.