Being active on the equity side, we realized there was an opportunity in the marketplace to get involved with other transactions where we couldn’t really be involved from an equity perspective, but we liked our risk-reward. The Spruce Capital platform is really an equity investment and development business.

We’re also in the process building a ground-up hotel in Downtown Brooklyn with another group. We bought that a number of years ago vacant. 1209 DeKalb between Bushwick and Evergreen. We bought multifamily assets and we have a large asset in Brooklyn, in Bushwick - we’re big believers in North Brooklyn. We ultimately bought those three parcels and two air rights parcels and developed a ground-up condominium at 151 East 78th Street that we sold down and delivered the units earlier this year. Through that platform, we assembled a site on 78th Street that was three individual buildings, two smaller townhouses and one bigger townhouse that belonged to a not-for-profit on the Upper East Side. We sold them, and that market sort of traded away from us as the underlying assets got more expensive. There was a big arbitrage in pricing from where those assets were trading to where their end values were as single-family homes. Schwartz: We’d been investing together several years prior to and we saw opportunity in the market at that time to buy multifamily, townhouses and convert them to high-end, single-family homes. SEE ALSO: Tuesday Is the Hot New Office Day in D.C.

Robert schwartz third point