Food Bazaar Lays Down $100M to Buy Its LIC Location

Lease or own? For one New York City supermarket, the decision came down to a nine-figure sum.

Bogopa, the parent company of the Food Bazaar grocery chain, paid $101.1 million to buy the site of its store at 42-02 Northern Boulevard in Queens’ Long Island City neighborhood, Crain’s reported. The deal for the 75,000-square-foot space works out to $1,348 per square foot.

The seller was an affiliate of Gould Investors, a Great Neck-based company run by Mark Lundy. His firm appears to have owned the four-acre site since the late 1990s.

Lundy and Edward Suh, the president of Bogopa, both failed to respond to requests for comment from the outlet.

For Bogopa, the decision likely came down to a comparison between ownership and renting. How the cost calculation went down is unknown, but the rent on the lease was estimated by CoStar to range from $29 to $35 per square foot.

The supermarket is not alone at the site between 42nd Street and 42nd Place, as other food and beverage retail chains, including Dunkin’ and Singas Famous Pizza, occupy space. It’s unclear if Suh plans to make any alterations to the property.

There might be precedent for change. Bogopa in October obtained a $90 million loan from KeyBank for a mixed-use building at 1100 Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The company is redeveloping the site into an 11-story, 233-unit mixed-use development, which will include a 29,000-square-foot supermarket.

There are more than 30 Food Bazaar locations across the tri-state area, including stores across New York City, New Jersey and Connecticut.

— Holden Walter-Warner