Richard Ohebshalom’s Pink Stone Capital may be between a rock and hard place in Downtown Brooklyn.
The developer’s brick-clad, 103-unit apartment building at 180 Nassau Street is facing foreclosure after Pink Stone allegedly failed to service debt secured by the property.
Chicago-based commercial real estate lender Prime Finance moved Wednesday to foreclose on the property, court records show, aftering buying a $52 million note on it from Investors Bank in September.
Prime claims that Pink Stone failed to resume payments after a forbearance period extended to the developer in December 2020 ended in May. In June, Prime notified the borrower that the loan was in default, according to the complaint. Investors issued the $52 million loan in 2014, the year the building was completed.
Ohebshalom tried selling the 10-story, 109,000-square-foot property in 2018, asking north of $60 million according to sources at the time, but no deal was reached. A potential obstacle at the time: The building’s 15-year 421a property tax abatement was nearing a phase-out period, leaving any potential buyer with a progressively heftier tax bill.
Property taxes owed on the building will jump from $2,240 this year to $19,880 next year, according to the city’s Department of Finance. A two-bedroom unit in the building went into contract earlier this year with an asking rent of $4,400 a month, up from $3,900 in 2019, according to StreetEasy.
Pink Stone, which bought the development site at Nassau and Duffield streets for $11.28 million from Brooklyn developer Isaac Hager in 2012, did not return a request for comment.
Prime, which declined to comment, has purchased at least one other piece of debt from Investors Bank in recent weeks: a $40 million loan secured by Galil Management’s portfolio of five walk-up rental buildings at 260-268 Elizabeth Street in Nolita. No foreclosure has been initiated at those properties, according to records.
A year ago, Pink Stone sold a development site in the Financial District to North Carolina developer Grubb Properties for $89 million.