Bed-Stuy Frenetic With Apartment Development, Leasing

By Dees Stribling, Contributing Editor

New York—A-1 Properties recently started work on the mixed-use 802-806  Myrtle Ave. in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, and has won $9.3 million in construction financing for the project from Eastern Union Funding. It’s another example of the growth of Bed-Stuy as a popular residential neighborhood.

The nine-story, 44-unit building, which includes a basement level, also includes 5,700 square feet of ground floor retail. The residential units will have cantilevered balconies and diagonal rows of windows vertically lined up on the building. The developer tapped New York architect J. Frankl Associates to design the property, and estimates it will be completed by fall 2016.

“Rental projects continue to flock to Bed-Stuy, and the neighborhood is well-poised to be the next Bushwick,” said Eastern Union senior managing director David Eisen. “The project on Myrtle Avenue further confirms that trend.”

MNS reports that in June, Bed-Stuy saw the highest increase of any neighborhood in term of listing inventory of apartment units, with an increase of 36 percent compared with May as a number of properties come on line. Listing inventory is up 4.5 percent across all neighborhoods in the borough.

Also, the Brooklyn neighborhoods with the largest growth in average rents for the month were Bed-Stuy, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint, with rents for each neighborhood increasing an average of 2.94 percent, 2.88 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively. Williamsburg and Bed-Stuy were the only two neighborhoods in the company’s June report that saw rents climb for all unit types.

Specifically, in Bed-Stuy—where price increases were accompanied by a large quantity of inventory hitting the market—rents for the middle 50 percent of units grew by nearly 5 percent. That indicates that the majority of growth in rent prices occurred not in outliers or oversized listings, but in the core of the marketing inventory, MNS posited.