Five years ago, skeptics wondered whether renters would pay $3,200 a month to live along the Harlem River waterfront in Mott Haven; today, the 18-story glass towers overlooking the Third Avenue Bridge are 98 percent full. Cheskel Schwimmer's Chess Builders bought the Mott Haven parcel for $18.5 million in 2019, built the 200-unit tower at 2401 Third Avenue, and just sold the stabilized asset to Scott Rechler's RXR and Black Spruce for $66 million ($400 a foot, or $330,000 a door). When the deed closed on December 4, 2025, RXR Realty (Scott Rechler) and Black Spruce Management had officially taken down 2401 Third Avenue from Cheskel Schwimmer's Chess Builders for $66 million, with Meridian Capital Group / Eastdil Secured brokering the trade.
Look past the sticker price and the trade tells a clear story about replacement cost in Bronx. At $400 a square foot—or $330,000 a door across its 200 apartments— across 165,000 square feet, the closing price marks a 256.8 percent step-up over the $18.5 million basis recorded in August 2019. In today's five-borough construction market, buying modern or well-maintained brick at $400 a square foot still beats the time and cost of digging a foundation from scratch. Even better for the buyers, the in-place rent roll hands them a verified 6.20 percent going-in cap rate from day one.
Rolling the Construction Note Into a $42.9M Freddie Mac CEMA
How you structure the debt on a Bronx acquisition matters almost as much as what you pay for the deed. Freddie Mac (via Walker & Dunlop) stepped up with a $42.9 million senior loan—representing 65 percent loan-to-value—while the buyers wrote a $23.1 million equity check behind it.
Rather than extinguishing the seller's old note and originating a scratch mortgage, the buyers and Freddie Mac kept the existing mortgage wrapper alive through a Consolidation, Extension, and Modification Agreement, or CEMA. Because New York City levies a roughly 2.8 percent mortgage recording tax on new commercial debt, that single piece of legal plumbing saved the deal upwards of $1.2 million at the closing table—cash that stays in the property's capex and leasing reserve instead of going to the Department of Finance.
From Our Desk
When we look at 2401 Third Avenue on our placement desk at Light Tower Group, the lesson for New York sponsors comes down to the marriage of entry basis and lender selection. RXR Realty (Scott Rechler) and Black Spruce Management didn't try to fight the tape—they bought Mott Haven footage at $400 a square foot and paired it with the exact lender bucket built for this business plan. Mott Haven has officially graduated from a merchant-build frontier to an institutional core-plus submarket—and converting a construction loan directly into a 65 percent Freddie Mac CEMA saved the buyers over $1.1 million in recording taxes at the finish line.