A few years after Shibber Khan’s Criterion Group first explored selling a Long Island City site on Northern Boulevard, the firm has finally executed a deal.
Criterion sold the commercial unit at 31-08 Northern Boulevard to the Carlyle Group for $80 million, public records show. The commercial condo unit spans 180,000 square feet, occupying part of the building’s first floor and the entirety of the remaining floors.
The Queens-based development firm bought the development site in 2015 from investor Joel Gluck for $40 million, planning to hold on to it long term. But after getting some appealing offers, Criterion started marketing it for sale a year later.
Unable to find a deal, Criterion pre-filed a building application with the city’s building department in 2019. The project was initially set to span 255,000 square feet and become one of the biggest self storage facilities in the city.
Columbia Pacific Advisors Bridge Lending provided a $28 million refinanced loan for the development at the time. Public Storage manages and operates the facility.
Khan told the Commercial Observer the firm sold the property to take “advantage of market conditions and positioning ourselves to transact quickly.”
Criterion and Carlyle aren’t strangers to self storage. In November 2020, a Carlyle subsidiary purchased a lot at 1223 East New York Avenue for $13 million from Criterion. Prior to the sale, Criterion gained city approval for a three-story self storage facility.
Last year, Carlyle landed a $31.8 million construction loan from Santander Bank to build the self storage facility in Crown Heights. It renewed the permits for the 43,000-square-foot site with the funding.
There has been a nationwide surge in self storage properties since the onset of the pandemic, with demand and asking rents on a steady rise. No market is seeing a bigger influx in self storage space than New York, where nearly 12 million square feet is planned, including 6.2 million square feet this year, according to RentCafe.
Queens leads the city’s planned self storage development space.
