Colliers CEO's Family Office Pays $153M For Future Upper East Side Home Depot
Times may be tough in the commercial brokerage business, but Jay Hennick, the CEO and largest shareholder of Toronto real estate firm Colliers International Group, isn't letting that stop him from spending nine figures to acquire a large Upper East Side retail space.
Hennick & Co., Hennick's family office, has paid $153M to acquire the retail condo at 401 E. 60th St., which is fully leased to Starbucks and a yet-to-open, 120K SF Home Depot location, it announced Thursday in a press release.
Hennick bought the condo, which is at the base of the Bridge Tower apartment building at the foot of the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, from Gazit Horizons, the U.S. subsidiary of Israeli real estate firm G City, formerly Gazit Globe.
The sale went under contract in December 2022, Crain's New York Business reported at the time, but the buyer was undisclosed. G City announced the sale in a filing on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, where it is publicly traded. The sale has yet to be recorded in New York City property records.
Gazit Horizons purchased the majority of the retail space in 2017 for $73.3M from The Brodsky Organization, which developed the condo tower in 1999, The Real Deal reported. It bought the remainder of the space in a much smaller deal the next year, then spent $20M upgrading it for the Home Depot, which backfilled a vacancy left by Bed Bath & Beyond, Crain's reported.
Gazit Horizons refinanced the building, which is also called 410 E. 60th St., in 2021 with a $134M mortgage that allowed it to generate proceeds of $30M, it said in a news release at the time.
That financing, which included an $83.1M gap loan, according to PincusCo, carried a 3.3% fixed interest rate, G City said in the release.
It isn't the first deal Hennick has done with Gazit Horizons. It also in recent years has bought stakes in the Israeli firm's 1430 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge's Harvard Square and York Mills Centre in Toronto, it said in a press release.
“We are pleased to add the Bridge Tower Place Retail to our growing collection of premiere real estate assets,” Hennick & Co. Managing Director Jory Hennick said in a statement. “As a private family investment firm with patient capital, we can act quickly and execute on opportunities when others cannot. We continue to seek out properties that align with our strategy of accumulating unique real estate in irreplaceable locations that we can be proud-to-own forever.”
Jory Hennick, who worked in capital markets at Colliers before moving over to head investments at his family's firm, declined to comment further when reached by phone Thursday afternoon.
Jay Hennick founded property management giant FirstService Corp. in 1985 and served as its CEO until 2015 when the company merged with Colliers International and spun off its FirstService Residential firm, where Hennick serves as chairman.
He has served as CEO at Colliers since 2015, overseeing the company's path as a standalone, publicly traded commercial real estate services firm. Colliers took in $3.1B in revenue in the first nine months of 2023, down 4% from the same period in 2022.
The company instituted cost-control measures last year as revenues began to fall but still had to revise its outlook downward going into the fourth quarter amid persistently sluggish transaction volumes.
CORRECTION, JAN. 12, 11 A.M. ET: Hennick & Co. jointly owns 1430 Massachusetts Ave. and York Mills Centre with Gazit Horizons. A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the firm had bought the properties. This story has been updated.
