The New York landlord-developer converting ex-downtown Harford office space to apartments has added a pair of suburban professional office buildings to his mounting Connecticut realty portfolio.
Yisroel Rabinowitz, of Brooklyn, N.Y., says he spent a total $4.6 million on the pair he recently acquired from Avon medical-office builder-developer Casle Corp.
In Berlin, Rabinowitz paid $3.03 million for the 35,000-square-foot professional office complex at 1224 Mill St. Three fully-leased buildings comprise the site occupied by law and insurance firms, real estate professionals and others. Regus entirely occupies one of the buildings, he said.
There is room on the site for a fourth building for which Rabinowitz says he’s in the early stages of weighing the likelihood of moving ahead with its development.
In Rocky Hill, Rabinowitz said he paid Casle $1.6 million for the 10,000-square-foot medical-office building at 543 Cromwell Ave. in which St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center is lead tenant. Other physicians, too, have offices in the fully occupied building.
Rabinowitz is finishing up conversion of the former Masonic Lodge-cum-office-building at 201 Ann Uccello St. Now called The Grand, the property is on track as the first downtown office-to-apartment conversion to come on line for occupancy.
Meantime, 7,000 square feet of decade-long vacant space on the third floor of the 50,000-square-foot retail-office building Rabinowitz owns at the corner of Asylum and Main Streets has undergone an extensive makeover.
With large windows overlooking both streets, the space is available either as a medical clinic or offices, or as retail space, he said. Six-story 11 Asylum was Rabinowitz’s first downtown Hartford realty acquisition in 2008.
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Windsor sports arena
Tactical Airsoft leased about 22,000 square feet in a Windsor warehouse to serve as the largest indoor recreational arena in New England, brokers say.
RBMM Realty LLC owns the warehouse at 1220 Kennedy Road. O,R&L Commercial was its broker.
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Gerber’s lease extension
Tolland textile-apparel software/hardware maker Gerber Scientific Inc. has extended to four years its lease of 60,925 square feet of production space at 83 Gerber Road West in South Windsor.
Gerber owned the 194,000-square-foot building until 2011, when it was sold for $6.8 million to TicketNetwork Inc.
Gerber reportedly signed a one-year lease.
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Greg Seay is the Hartford Business Journal News Editor.
