Lionheart Buys Greenwich Village Apartment Building for $42M

Lionheart’s Ophir Sternberg with 24-26 West 9th Street (Loopnet, Lionheart, Getty)

UPDATED Dec. 9, 2022, 5:04 p.m.

The strength of New York City’s rental market has not gone unnoticed by Ophir Sternberg’s Lionheart Capital.

An entity connected to the Miami-based development and investment firm bought an apartment building at 24-28 West Ninth Street in Greenwich Village for $41.5 million, according to city property records filed Thursday.

The seller was the estate of Asher Hiesiger, with Barrington George Adams signing as executor. The property was last sold in 1986 for an undisclosed amount, city records show.

The 10-floor, 50-unit, 48,000-square-foot building will remain a rental building, according to Lionheart.

Sternberg’s acquisition of the Greenwich Village property marks the developer’s latest foray into Manhattan. Lionheart sold the Garfield condominium building at 142 Henry Street on the Lower East Side and about 363,000 square feet of residential and hospitality sites at 16 West 21st Street in Flatiron, 152-156 West 26th Street in Chelsea, 27 Grand Street in SoHo and 133-135 Greenwich Street in the Financial District, according to the firm.

Lionheart’s portfolio of residential, hospitality, office and retail assets is centered around the firm’s South Florida base. The company bought a six-story,100,000-square-foot office building in Fort Lauderdale  for $14.5 million in January and is perhaps best known for developing the Ritz-Carlton Residences in Miami Beach.

Lionheart has also been focused lately on special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs.

Its Village acquisition comes as multifamily deals have plummeted because of rising interest rates. A National Multifamily Housing Council survey of 268 multifamily executives found that 89 percent reported that sales volume had fallen from August through October.

Deals for New York City multifamily properties totaled $3.63 billion in the third quarter, a 30 percent decline from the previous quarter’s $5.15 billion, according to a report from Ariel Property Advisors. The 366 deals involved 445 apartment buildings; both figures represent declines of 23 percent from the second quarter.

This article has been revised with updated information about Lionheart’s porfolio.