By Gus Saltonstall
An Upper West Side residential building was purchased recently by a real estate developer for $42 million, as first reported by The Commercial Observer and as shown in the city register.
The 15-story building at 698 West End Avenue, between West 93rd and 94th streets, has 90 units. The new owner of the UWS building is Benchmark Real Estate Group, which bought the property from Heller Realty.
Jordan Vogel, the co-founder of Benchmark Real Estate, told Crain’s New York that it plans to completely renovate the building and add amenities to make it a “premiere luxury rental” on the Upper West Side.
“New York City rarely offers entry points like this for such high quality real estate and we are excited to be buying when most others aren’t,” Vogel added to Crain’s.
Benchmark Real Estate, which owns properties across the United States, owns two other buildings on the Upper West Side at 166 West 75th Street and 250 West 85th Street. It is not the first time Benchmark has done business with Heller Realty in the neighborhood.
Benchmark purchased the 15-story residential property at 250 West 85th Street, on the corner of Broadway, from Heller Realty in September 2025.
The building at 698 West End Avenue was constructed in 1925 and has a doorman, along with a live-in super.
It is unclear at this time how quickly Benchmark Real Estate Group will begin making renovations within the building.
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I live in 250 West 85th and Benchmark is ruining the building. They are tearing out pre-war details, added horrible carpet (think cheap casino) in the hallways which now makes smells linger, and have jacked the rent. This is just classic private equity turning something nice into something hallow.
Even free market leases have to follow annual rental increases. How did they raise rents?
As a young adult, I lived there, sharing the rent (low!) with a roommate, in 1974-75. There was an elevator operator! It was beautiful. I was too young and foolish to know I should have stayed. Flash forward to today, I would be really p—-d off!
It also allowed its commercial tenants to install a very loud HVAC system exhausting into the courtyard. I don’t know how anyone on that side of the building can sleep.
And 250 has a scaffolding for at least 7 years, an eyesore for all the neighbors
There is no scaffolding there currently
Bargain. That is only 400k a unit.
Thanks for the helpful article. A few questions about this building and the area:
1. How many of the apartments currently are rent regulated?
2. What elementary school is it zoned for? Guessing 75 or 84?
3. I haven’t been near there in a while – wasn’t there a plan to build an addition with some weird support structure on top of the building diagonally across and north of there? Whatever happened to that? It is a fairly low building and I know they wanted to go higher but couldn’t kick people out to tear down and rebuild so they were discussing another alternative.
4. Did they ever close the loop on the mentally unstable young woman who murdered her neighbor in 710 WEA?
I did some easy research:
I think this quote from Benchmark’s Vogel in Crain’s is telling:
““New York City rarely offers entry points like this for such high quality real estate and we are excited to be buying when most others aren’t.”
So Heller sold the building for cheap, $467k per unit. Obviously, it isn’t making a ton of money on rentals, even a studio on West End Avenue would go for more than that at a market rate, and most of the apartments here are 1 and 2 BRs ( https://streeteasy.com/building/698-west-end-avenue-new_york )
As of 2024, the building had 30 rent stabilized units ( https://whoownswhat.justfix.org/en/address/MANHATTAN/698/WEST%20END%20AVENUE). That means there are about 60 in the free market,
Isn’t a building that old likely to have rent-regulated apartments?
They’re no doubt going to get rid of any charm left in that building and milk it for all that it’s worth. Cue the free market lemmings in 3..2..1..
It is Lemming with a capital L.
Please feel free to:
1. Move
2. Buy the building.
Your perspective may change.
Thank GOD it is not another shelter considering we have 8 men’s shelters that the city put in from West 94th Street to West 99th street from 2019 through 2025. The city found loopholes and the DHS were audited and found to have faked the math using the overall number of beds over the whole entire UWS number of residents. Not pointing out they are all within 5 blocks.
More to come on this…
100% in agreement.
What does “more to come on this” mean?! Are you suing the city? Doing something about it?? Please say yes!
Research is being done to how this happened to the West 90’s. Plan is to bring it to light to all who live here so we can speak up as one very loud voice and demand action. Supporting each other is the only way we’ll get our quality of life, public safety and small businesses back.
I live next door. The city ruined the neighborhood when they installed all those shelters. Now it’s more of an asylum than a neighborhood. I hope that having wealthier residents in this building and the Williams on 95th will bring more pressure to restore the quality of life here.
This is exactly what has happened. Tell everyone you know here that the city abused the neighborhood, ignoring the oversaturation.
It would help our immediate area if people would speak up about the unfair imbalance and disregard of the “Fair Share” policy. We pay the same taxes as across town, yet they have 500 “beds” and we have “1200” within these 5 blocks. It has completely changed our streets over the last 5 years. The city should not get away with it. Tell your city council member you want the city to fix this situation. They can if enough people speak up. Again, more data to come.
As long as we have the albatross of Gale Brewer around our necks that is not going to happen. When you see how the council reps from other districts stand up for their people while all we get from her are photo ops of her at the Met Gala I just want to scream.
The city council is now packed with socialists. They won’t care about your tax problems.
The building is a mix of market rate apartments, stabilized, and some controlled (mostly elderly). Those of us in market rate apartments are worried about potential rent increases
What would be fair is if the people who are rent stabilized and controlled pay a little more.
This would help their neighbors out.
It would also be in the spirit of what MayorMandani is trying to accomplish, with the distribution of wealth.
100% this
@PennyLn. How is it that there are market rate apartments in the building? Under previous rent regulations some apartments became free market?
Yes – under previous rent regulations, a rent stabilized apartment could be “converted” to a market rate apartment if (a) the tenant’s annual income reached a certain level or (b) the rent for the apartment hit a certain monthly amount o. The newer regulations have removed both of these triggers.
NYC continues to not build housing at a sufficient pace, and as our economy continues to grow, demand to live in the best city in the country remains incredibly high and everyone in a market rate apartment is at risk of large rent increases.
Absolutely agree with you. NYC needs new apartments at essentially every price point (ok, maybe not the same price point as those on billionaire’s row).
Wow. That’s my building where I was born and raised. Now I live exactly 30 blocks south on West End Avenue. Yep, been here my whole life. Seeing this sure does bring up memories of a time – a time that wasn’t so cool, not so safe. Grateful for music saving me. It’s just a picture, but seeing this def blew my mind this morning.
I do not understand this concept. Particularly since it is six units per floor, and many of them are likely to be rent-regulated. Which means that after the company puts in all that money to upgrade the building, they, like all owners of buildings with rent-regulated apartments, will begin complaining that they cannot maintain the building because they are not collecting enough rent.
This seems like an obvious self-fulfilling prophecy.
Market rate rents will subsidize regulated tenants. It’s been that way for ages and still is true. Building could also attempt to offer various new amenities only to market rate tenants, but that’s very tricky and could get them into trouble with city.
There are hundreds of buildings in Manhattan alone with mixed rent regulated and free market tenants. Latter usually have more modern apartments with all sorts of amenities such as dishwashers, newer bathrooms and kitchens…. Meanwhile many rent regulated tenants are living with things stuck in 1960’s to 1970’s if not before.
Please no steel and plexiglass please no steel and plexiglass oh please no!!!
Always a shame when they do away with pre-war details.
Is the building occupied? Making renovations while occupied would be a nightmare on multiple fronts.
Curious what was the 2025 purchase price?
What happens to the Tenants living there now?
In theory, nothing happens to the rent-regulated tenants. The new landlord can try to buy them out. Depending on the extent of the renovations, it may be less pleasant to live there while the work is going on than it is now,
It seems likely that the market-rate tenants will be asked to pay higher rents, and new tenants coming into the building will pay whatever the market can bear.
The “completely renovate” line may be misleading. They probably won’t renovate the interiors of the regulated apartments, beyond what is necessary for building maintenance (electrical and plumbing, stuff like that).
There is no point in offering current RS tenants buyout offers unless building is going to be demolished and lot redeveloped.
Changes in RS laws from 2019 removed vacancy/luxury decontrol of RS units.
https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/faqs/deregulation/
When a RS unit does become vacant a LL may decide not to put it on market again. This is true when legal regulated rent is far below current market.