All Year Holdings Sells Brooklyn Portfolio to Rubin Schron and Graph Group
By Celia Young March 15, 2022 4:11 pm
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All Year Holdings will sell its Brooklyn apartment portfolio to Rubin “Rubie” Schron’s Cammeby’s International Group and Avi Philipson’s Graph Group, in a deal that should allow the struggling All Year to exit bankruptcy.
Cammeby’s, known for its New York City and New Jersey multifamily holdings, and real estate and health care investment firm Graph Group will take 100 percent of the equity in the restructured All Year in exchange for $60 million — $40 million in cash and $20 million in promissory notes from the joint venture, according to federal court documents.
The joint venture would take over more than 100 of All Year’s assets, mostly apartment buildings in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick and Williamsburg, that include more than 2,500 apartments and nearly 100 commercial units, The Real Deal first reported. All Year expects the deal to close in August, though that deadline could be delayed, according to documents filed in United States Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York.
Not among those assets is the William Vale Hotel in Williamsburg, All Year’s signature development that attracted a bidding war in December 2021 when the company first declared bankruptcy, including a $163 million all-cash offer from the hotel’s co-owner, Zelig Weiss. A representative from All Year did not immediately respond to questions on the fate of the hotel.
It also doesn’t include the 911-unit Denizen residential complex at 54 Noll Street and 123 Melrose Street in Bushwick. All Year sold that to Atlas Capital Group for $506 million in December 2021 after filing for bankruptcy in an attempt to block a UCC foreclosure attempt from Mack Real Estate on the development.
As part of the new deal, Cammeby’s and Graph Group agreed to assume at least $600 million of unsecured claims against Yoel Goldman’s All Year, including $50.5 million to alternative asset lender Downtown Capital Partners for mezzanine financing payments and preferred equity, plus another $37.8 million to the Florida-based real estate investment fund TAZ Partners, created by the Zubizarreta family and named for the late advertising executive Teresa Zubizarreta. TAZ Partners alleged that Goldman, the founder of All Year, entered a confession of judgment in its favor, according to court documents.
Graph Group and Cammeby’s did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the potential sale and it’s unclear what the joint venture plans to do with the properties if the deal closes. Cammeby’s holds thousands of apartments in New York and New Jersey, and last year snagged another 5,000 units across 40 buildings in the Garden State, as CO reported. It was founded in 1967 by Schron, who once tried to buy the Empire State Building and was a defendant in a lawsuit from two survivors of the fire in a Bronx apartment building that killed 17 people on Jan. 8, but was dismissed as a defendant on Jan. 31, according to court filings.
Philipson, who runs Graph Group, operates nursing homes like his father, Bent Philipson, who founded a nursing facility consulting firm, Philosophy Care Centers. The elder Philipson has invested in multiple long-term care facilities across New York and New Jersey. The elder Philipson is also a director at Graph Group, according to Open Corporates.
The two Philipsons had stakes in Cold Spring Hills Center for Nursing & Rehabilitation through SentosaCare, which was found to have “knowingly benefited” from labor that violated the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The company imposed large financial penalties to force more than 200 underpaid Filipino nurses to keep working at the poorly-rated nursing home in Long Island, N.Y, Newsday reported.
The potential sale of All Year follows more than 100 phone and Zoom calls with 40 potential bidders that Meridian Capital Group, the exclusive broker on the sale, arranged — eventually narrowing the potential buyers down to just two.
A representative from All Year declined to comment on anything beyond the letter to the court announcing the deal.
All Year, which made its mark on Brooklyn through cheap financing from the Israeli bond market, started missing payments in 2019 and suffered through a long list of defaults and other financial woes. After investor disputes and allegations of fraud, Goldman was removed from decision-making last year.
Meridian did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Update: This story has been updated to indicate that Cammeby’s is no longer a defendant in the Bronx fire case.
Celia Young can be reached at cyoung@commercialobserver.com.
