Three-Way JV Acquires Building at 84 Williams Street in Downtown Manhattan

By Joshua Ayers, Senior Editor

New York—A joint venture between Korman Communities, Shorewood Real Estate Group LLC and Prodigy Network has announced that it has acquired the building at 84 William Street in Downtown Manhattan.

The community, which will be branded as AKA Wall Street, will undergo a 15-month, $40 million transformation into a high-end, fully-furnished community that features extended-stay residences for people visiting New York. The AKA brand is a division of Korman that specializes in short-term luxury long-stay rentals for periods of weeks to months and longer.

“AKA Wall Street marks our first venture in Downtown Manhattan and is part of our overall vision of expanding more within New York City,” says Brad Korman, co-CEO of Korman Communities. “With all of the new development, luxury retailers and fine restaurants opening in the Financial District, we are confident in this market and found that there is a need for luxury long-stay accommodations here.”

Renovations to the community will include an upgrade to the existing lobby, as well as the addition of a lounge, café, fitness center and outdoor space. The community will feature 140 guest suites that will range in size from 450 to 1,000 square feet.

Almost a quarter of the funds used toward the AKA Wall Street project were crowd-sourced from international investors.

“AKA Wall Street is a $110 million project in Manhattan, with $25 million crowdfunded by foreign investors from six different countries,” says Rodrigo Nino, CEO and founder of Prodigy Network. “We are proud to close on this extended stay development with Korman Communities and Shorewood Real Estate Group.”

Prodigy Network specializes in cultivating capital through its crowd funding platform and broke an international record for collecting more than $175 million from 3,800 different investors to build the BD Bacata Skyscraper in Columbia.

The funding model will be used by Shorewood Real Estate Group to continue to invest in Manhattan real estate for the next year to year-and-a-half, according to the company’s President, S. Lawrence Davis.

“AKA Wall Street is the first of a series of acquisitions that we will be making in Manhattan through the crowdfunding model over the next 12 to 18 months,” Davis says. “There is tremendous demand from individual investors to participate in high quality projects that are typically not available to them.”