Largest deal in a decade
The Shmooze doesn't usually cover local Brooklyn real estate news. But when a nine-story, 500-bed nursing home in the heart of Boro Park sells for $161.5 million - after being purchased for $19 million fourteen years ago - we feel professionally obligated to say something.
Let's do the math together. $19 million in 2011. $161.5 million in 2026. That is an 850% return. In fourteen years. On a nursing home. While simultaneously navigating COVID, staffing crises, five-star ratings, survey teams, Medicaid rate freezes, and whatever else the last decade has thrown at SNF operators in New York.
For context: the S&P 500 returned approximately 400% over the same period. Centers Health Care did more than double that. In a nursing home. In Brooklyn.
The buyer is a Lakewood, New Jersey-based entity - which will surprise approximately nobody reading this newsletter. The financing involves a significant loan package - which also surprises nobody.
$1.6 Billion. 35 Buildings. Seven Banks.
The Boro Park Center sale you've been reading about - the $161.5 million, the Lakewood buyer, the Centers Health Care exit - is not a standalone transaction. It's one piece of a 35-building portfolio deal that closed at approximately $1.6 billion total.
One deal. Thirty-five New York nursing homes. Centers Health Care's entire New York footprint. Done.
The paperwork started hitting public records this week, which is why it's suddenly appearing as if multiple deals closed simultaneously.
Seven banks were involved in financing this transaction. The only name circulating in the press right now is Huntington Bank - which tells you how incomplete the public picture is.
Assembling a syndicated debt package across seven institutions for a 35-building New York nursing home portfolio is not something that happens quickly or easily. You need lenders who understand healthcare real estate, who are comfortable with the regulatory complexity of New York SNFs, who can get comfortable with each other's positions in the capital stack, and who can all move together toward a closing on the same timeline.
Anyone who has closed a single CHOW in New York knows how long one building takes. Multiply that by 35 and add a seven-bank syndication and you start to understand what two years actually means here.
This is almost certainly one of the largest single healthcare real estate transactions in New York in at least a decade.
The $161.5 million figure attached to Boro Park Center specifically isn't necessarily the standalone valuation of that single building. It's the way the mortgage allocation was structured across the capital stack.
When you have seven banks financing a $1.6 billion portfolio across 35 buildings, the debt gets allocated across individual properties in ways that reflect the financing structure - not necessarily what each building would fetch if sold individually on the open market.
So when you see "$161.5 million for Boro Park Center" in the deed records, what you're really seeing is how the lenders allocated their security interest across the portfolio, not a precise per-building appraisal.
Apparently Chuny also did a nice refi and pulled out some shekels in bags. When one of the sharpest operators in the New York market spends two years quietly assembling a deal of this scale, clears the attorney general, gets seven banks to the table simultaneously, and walks away with a meaningful cash-out - that's not a guy who's done making moves.