Yonkers campus sells for $14 million

John Golden

 Apr-02-10, 01:27 PM

A Queens-based operator of long-term care centers will reopen a residential health care campus that closed two years ago in Yonkers as an assisted-living center for senior citizens.

The 11-acre campus overlooking the Saw Mill River Parkway sold for $14 million, according to brokers at Rand Commercial Services. 

 The property includes three buildings totaling more than 100,000 square feet of space and a caretaker’s house, said Paul Adler, Rand’s senior executive managing director. At the highest elevation in hilly Yonkers, the campus also comes with aircraft warning lights, said a spokesman at The Jewish Guild for the Blind, the property’s former owner.

The buyer, Westchester ALP Property L.L.C., is an entity of Charles-Edouard Gros, executive director at Fairview Nursing Care Center in Forest Hills and owner of Center Management Group, which operates skilled nursing care and assisted-living centers throughout New York state. The buyer will lease the property to another Gros entity, Westchester Center for Independent and Assisted Living.

 The seller, the nonprofit Jewish Guild for the Blind, has been a presence in Westchester County since 1914. It acquired the Yonkers campus on Stratton Street South in 1937 and operated a nursing home for the aged blind there until February 2008. The guild continues to operate an adult day health care center in Yonkers at 4 Executive Plaza.

Gros said the state-of-the-art independent and assisted-living center will house the elderly in about 150 studio apartments. The on-site amenities will include restaurant-style dining, a 24-hour common kitchen for residents’ use, beauty salon and physician services.

Though the assisted-living center will be built to private-pay standards, Gros said, “It will be one of the few in the state that will accept Medicaid.” He said the operator plans to later expand availability for low-income residents. “We want to not only provide the best care for private pay, but keep it open to all residents,” he said.

“There’s no such thing available in Westchester County,” Gros said. “We expect that there’s going to be a tremendous demand for these services. There are many chains that are out there” – including Classic Residence by Hyatt in Yonkers – “but none of them have an affordable component to it. This facility will be at the same level as the chains that are charging $10,000 a month and yet we have that affordable element.”

Gros said the renovated campus should be ready to reopen in the first quarter of 2011.

Rand Commercial Services brokered the sale for both buyer and seller. Adler and Nicholas Spano, a Rand agent and former state senator from Yonkers, negotiated the sale.

With the assisted-living center a for-profit business, the property will return to the city tax rolls, Adler noted. “It’s a significant sale – and it’s done,” he said.

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