Foreclosure Ahead For Site Once Slated For Georgia's Tallest Residential Tower
A New York developer's long-stalled quest to erect the Southeast’s tallest residential tower on a prime parcel in Midtown Atlanta appears to be coming to an ignominious end.
Miami-based Benmark Capital has filed to foreclose on the Midtown site where Olympia Heights Management had planned the tower, No2 Opus Place. Benmark plans to auction off the $40M loan Nov. 7 on the Fulton County Courthouse steps, according to a foreclosure notice published this week.
Olympia Heights bought the 4-acre parcel across from the Four Seasons in 2014 for $22M, but the landlord, run by Shaya Boymelgreen, a New York developer who was banned from selling condos in his home state, increased the debt load since then on the site at 98 14th St. with a string of short-term refinancing deals.
Benmark CEO Mark Simon didn't return calls seeking comment as of press time. Roni Avraham, who spearheaded the project for Olympia Heights and at one time claimed the developer had pre-sold 70 units, couldn't be reached for comment. The Atlanta Business Chronicle was the first to report the filing.
News of the pending auction has at least one prominent Atlanta luxury residential broker celebrating that something may finally come of what has languished as a weed-covered hole in the center of the hottest development submarket in Atlanta.
“I can’t believe that they kept that alive this long,” Engel & Völkers Atlanta founder and CEO Christa Huffstickler told Bisnow. “It’s such a premier site that I think that [foreclosure] is a really positive thing that happened.”
Olympia Heights entered the Atlanta market in 2014 with an audacious plan for what initially was planned as a three-tower project, including a 53-story condominium skyscraper reaching 730 feet, designed by Perkins & Will, where units would be listed ranging from $600K to $12M.
Olympia Heights promised luxury and lifestyle typically found in New York, Tokyo, Miami or Los Angeles, including access to a resort-style pool, high-end restaurants, a spa, a wine-tasting and storage room, an Imax theater and 24-hour concierge services. Units on top floors would have had sweeping views of Midtown and Downtown Atlanta.
Despite many projected start dates and claims of pre-sale activity, Olympia Heights never began work on the proposed project, other than digging up the site and making pretensions of starting work by bringing in steel beams.
After repeatedly blowing past announced construction start dates, some in Atlanta’s residential real estate community expressed skepticism that the project would ever see the light of day under the guidance of Olympia Heights. Above Atlanta Realtors founder Jeffrey Taylor Johnson dubbed it "Nopus" in an interview with Bisnow in 2019.
Other brokers said at the time they were steering potential buyers away from the project, which was being marketed by Berkshire Hathaway, over disbelief that Olympia Heights would ever deliver it.
Olympia Heights’ capital partner was Israeli-born Boymelgreen, who built thousands of luxury apartments in Manhattan and Brooklyn in the 1990s until his business fell apart during the Great Recession. In 2016, then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, in a settlement agreement spurred by an investigation over claims of shoddy and unfinished work on Boymelgreen's projects, sanctioned the developer by barring him from selling any condos in the state for two years.
Over the course of nearly a decade of owning the site, Olympia Heights reshaped the proposed project a handful of times, with the latest iteration just focused on one 1.8M SF, 53-story tower with 182 condo units and more than 200K SF of office space.
In recent years, though, Olympia Heights' main actions have been to refinance its loans on the property in incrementally increasing amounts. It had a $22M loan from The Ardent Cos., which it refinanced in 2020 with a $25.7M loan from New York-based SKW Funding.
Olympia Heights took out the $40M bridge loan with Benmark Capital in August 2022, Commercial Observer reported. Benmark's Simon told CO at the time that Olympia Heights needed to secure new financing within 30 days, but it was eager to provide new debt because of the activity happening around the site.
Kevin Green, the president and CEO of neighborhood booster group Midtown Alliance, said in an email to Bisnow that 98 14th St. is "a rare four-acre site in the heart of Midtown that awaits the right investors and the right time."
Huffstickler said the chance to get new blood owning the site — bounded by such Midtown icons as 1180 Peachtree, One Atlantic Center and Promenade Central — could mean something will rise over the hole in Midtown.
“If you look at Midtown, it’s like this piece of the puzzle that’s been sitting there doing nothing. It’s been nothing but an eyesore,” she said. “It’s a prominent piece of the puzzle that needs to have its day. This is that moment that is an opportunity for somebody to come in and do something extraordinary that is going to give back to the neighborhood.”
