Church buys GEICO Woodbury property for $27M

Church buys GEICO Woodbury property for M

After a earlier sale fell by, GEICO has bought its sprawling Woodbury property for $27 million. 

The client for the 236,365-square-foot workplace constructing on 20 acres at 750 Woodbury Highway is the Christian Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses. 

It’s unclear what the non secular group has deliberate for the property and church officers have been unable to be reached for remark. 

Church buys GEICO Woodbury property for M

750 Woodbury Highway Woodbury / Picture by Judy Walker

In 2021, GEICO was in contract to promote its Woodbury property to a New Jersey-based developer, however the deal fell by when it turned obvious that City of Oyster Bay wouldn’t enable a redevelopment of the positioning right into a warehousing and distribution complicated. Actual property sources say GEICO would have realized near $48 million if that first sale would have come to fruition. 

The Tilles household bought the Woodbury land to GEICO some 50 years in the past, and the four-story, pink brick and glass constructing served as an anchor for the household’s growth of the Woodbury workplace park because it opened in Oct. 1973, Peter Tilles instructed LIBN in 2021. 

In the meantime, GEICO signed a lease for 200,000 sq. toes of workplace area at 1 Huntington Quadrangle in Melville, the place it had introduced to workers in Nov. 2021 that the corporate would finally relocate to. The Chevy Chase, Md.-based firm, a completely owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, had deliberate to maneuver into its new digs within the fourth quarter of this yr, as soon as renovations on the Melville workplaces are accomplished. 

Nonetheless, since then, actual property sources say GEICO has been attempting to sublease the Melville area. Officers at GEICO couldn’t be reached for remark. 

Whereas GEICO settled for a smaller payday within the sale of its property, the most important loser within the Woodbury transaction is probably going the City of Oyster Bay, since as a spiritual group, the brand new proprietor of the property could be tax exempt. As of 2021, the annual property taxes on the previous GEICO property was about $1.227 million. 

The Woodbury sale, which closed on the final week of December, was brokered by Daniel Abbondandolo, Joegy Raju, David Bernhaut, Gary Gabriel and Ryan Larkin of Cushman & Wakefield.