A real estate investor has proposed converting the top three stories of a six-story office building in Norwalk into 35 apartments, according to an application filed with the city.
Alex Gurevich, doing business as 200 CT AVE. LLC, submitted the proposal to the city’s zoning officials in late November. Gurevich is the CEO of Continental Financial Corp., a Florida-based real estate company.
He said he is proposing the office-to-housing conversion because the area’s market for residential housing “seems to be booming,” and because recently enacted legislation signed by Gov. Ned Lamont requiring towns to develop housing plans should make such transitions easier.
He said he plans to file more detailed plans for the proposal at a later date. The plans refer to the 118,636-square-foot office building at 200 Connecticut Ave. as having eight stories, but it is a six-story structure built over a 117,000-square-foot, four-story parking garage, according to the city’s property records.
“We’re still in the very early stages of the application,” he told FairfieldBiz. “This is just exploratory.”
Gurevich said he is under contract to buy the property from the owner, which is SIG CRE 2023 Venture LLC, controlled by Signature Bridge Bank, a temporary institution formed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. following the collapse of Signature Bank.
The office building has been going through foreclosure since last December, according to court records, after 200 Route One Realty LLC, the property’s former owner and borrower, defaulted on a $6 million commercial mortgage originally issued by Signature Bank.
200 Route One Realty LLC is controlled by Jeffrey Supinsky, who is the co-founder of Valley East Property Management.
Earlier this month, a judge in state Superior Court in Stamford ordered 200 Route One Realty to sell the property to the bank for $4.2 million.
The office building and parking garage, which sit on 1.29 acres and were built in 1977, are appraised at $15 million and assessed at $10.5 million.
