In a joint venture between developers Saber-Hightower LLC and Granoff Real Estate, 101 and 201 Merritt 7, in the Merritt 7 office park in the New York City suburb of Norwalk, Connecticut, will be the sites of the project. the project is budgeted at $120 million, according to a report by WRE News While the acquisition price was not publicly disclosed. A pair of vacant office buildings in Connecticut have been acquired for redevelopment as multifamily housing.
Bank OZK has provided a $ 75.5 million senior construction loan to support the conversion of the buildings. The two eight-story buildings were the first of six built in the Merritt 7 office park, at the northeast corner of the Merritt Parkway and Route 7. Both buildings are steps from the Merritt 7 Metro-North station on the Danbury Branch, giving residents rail access to Stamford, Greenwich, and Manhattan alongside direct highway connections. “With 11-foot ceilings, wall-to-wall windows, and simple floor plates, it was apparent to us that we had great bones to work with.
“While some developers may have looked at these buildings as a teardown-and-rebuild opportunity, we saw the value in reusing what was there,” said Greg Belew, co-founder of Saber-Hightower. Rather than tearing down the buildings, they are being rebuilt for space and opportunity. The best approach to adaptive reuse is to keep it simple. We are making no structural modifications to either building, and that lets us control costs and mitigate risk.”