Rego Park Multifamily Redevelopment Now Open

By Dees Stribling, Contributing Editor

New York—Residents are now moving into the Contour, a redeveloped building in the Rego Park neighborhood of Queens that went from office space to apartments. Occupancy will be about 70 percent once the building’s residents have moved in.

The LeFrak family, New York developers whose history goes back roughly a century, originally built the 12-story property as an office building, called LeFrak Tower, in the 1960s. Its tenants for the last half-century or so have been mainly local professionals, such as attorneys and insurance companies, as well as offices of municipal government.

More recently, the LeFrak Organization undertook the structure’s redevelopment into a 108-unit residential property, to take advantage of New York’s, and particularly Queens’, red-hot residential market. According to Reis Inc., Queens County saw rental growth of 2 percent during the second quarter, though vacancies were up 50 basis points over the same period. Employment is up in the borough and so is demand for apartments.

Though Queens is an expensive market by national standards, Manhattan’s accelerated rental prices for market-rate properties make it and the other boroughs more appealing to price-conscious residents. The latest MNS Manhattan Rental Market Report, for example, says that rents for non-doorman studios in Manhattan averaged $2,261 in July, up 6.5 percent from a year earlier. Two bedrooms average over $4,300 per month.

The Contour offers studio, one- and two-bedroom units. Priced from $1,695 to $2,870 per month, residents can choose from nine different layouts in the building. All the units include in-home front door video-monitoring systems and independently controlled heating and cooling systems, and the developer asserts that one of the property’s most desired amenities is the stackable washer/dryer, which comes in every apartment.