After Manhattan’s massive Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village apartment complex rejected his overtures, one suitor is taking his pitch directly to tenants in an effort to fight off a challenger.
Two days after StuyTown’s tenants association announced it had teamed with Boston real-estate giant Brookfield Asset Management to turn the complex into condominiums, New York real-estate developer Gerald Guterman has launched a campaign to get tenants to drop Brookfield and go with him.
Yesterday, Guterman-Westwood Partners mailed a three-page letter to StuyTown’s 25,000 residents touting its plan as financially superior to Brookfield’s plan, which hasn’t provided any specifics.
In the letter, Guterman promises tenants a purchase price “equal to or less than” current rents.
Guterman also said his co-op conversion plan will move faster than Brookfield’s condo conversion due to the complexities involved in converting so many units.
StuyTown’s 56 buildings have 11,250 apartments. Converting each individual unit could take five to seven years, Guterman told The Post.
With a co-op conversion, he expects to buy the entire property in one fell swoop and re-sell the units back to tenants at around $315 a square foot, which he said will take just two years.
A person close to the tenants association, who asked not to be identified, said the association rejected Guterman because his plan calls for him to sell too quickly.
The tenants “don’t need a middle-man to come in and flip the property, make his fee and then leave,” this person said.
Guterman rejects this notion, saying he’s lined up a “nationally known” housing non-profit to buy the unsold units for renters and to act as landlord thereafter.
Guterman, who once chartered the famed Queen Elizabeth 2 ocean liner in 1986 for his son’s bar mitzvah, vowed to woo StuyTown’s tenants, who have been the subject of numerous real-estate battles in recent years.
“I’m going to send them out [letters], if I have to, every week. I’m entitled to do this. I’m not a kid,” he said.
