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Forest City Selling DoBro Site to Rabsky Group for $158M

Forest City Enterprises has reached an agreement to sell its vacant site at 625 Fulton Street to Rabsky Group for $158 million, according to Forest City’s third-quarter earnings report released today.

The site sits between Hudson Avenue and Rockwell Place across from Forest City’s 36-story residential building at 80 DeKalb Avenue, formerly known as 10 MetroTech Center.

Forest City demolished the seven-story, 359,000-square-foot office building at the site in 2013 and had plans to build a residential tower there, as Commercial Observer previously reported. The property was home to the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles. It was also the site of Barton’s Candy Company, which closed in 1981.

Last year, Forest City was looking for a partner to develop the site which offered 600,000 square feet of buildable space, or was interested in selling it. The company was asking $185 million, according to Crain’s New York Business.

“We remain as bullish as ever on the Brooklyn real estate market as demonstrated by our four residential buildings under construction today at Pacific Park, Brooklyn,” a spokeswoman for Forest City said in an email to CO. “This sale is related to our stated corporate commitment to our shareholders to shore up our balance sheet by enhancing liquidity and delivering through strategic dispositions as [Forest City Enterprises] becomes a [real estate investment trust] on Jan 1, 2016.”

Darcy Stacom and William Shanahan of CBRE represented Forest City in the deal, according to a spokesman for CBRE, who declined to provide further comment further. It wasn’t immediately clear who represented the buyer in the transaction. A representative of Williamsburg-based residential landlord Rabsky Group did not immediately return a request for comment.

Forest City owns a number of properties in Brooklyn, including 1 MetroTech Center and is co-developing Pacific Park, a residential complex which is under construction, with Greenland USA.

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https://commercialobserver.com/2015/...roup-for-158m/