Northwind Group has originated a $208 million first mortgage construction loan on 141 Willoughby Street, a 24-story Downtown Brooklyn tower that was finished in 2023 and never occupied, to fund its conversion into 239 rental apartments.
The loan retires existing debt on the 355,000-square-foot building and funds both the residential conversion on floors 8 through 23 and the lease-up of the commercial space on floors 1 through 7, which has been rebranded as 385 Gold, according to the Manhattan-based private equity firm and debt fund manager’s Sept. 11 announcement. A joint venture of Capstone Equities and BH3 Fund Advisors is leading the project; it took control of the property in 2025 and has spent the past year in predevelopment.
A conversion without the usual conversion problems
What makes the deal unusual is what the sponsor does not have to deal with. The tower was built to full Class A institutional specification but never leased, which means no tenant buyouts, no deferred maintenance and, per the release, no structural work of the kind that normally defines an office-to-residential job.
The physical layout also cooperates. The building has a side core and nearly column-free floorplates roughly 30 feet deep, wrapped in floor-to-ceiling glazing on four sides. Slab-to-slab heights run 15 to 17 feet, which the release says will produce finished ceilings well above what conventional new multifamily construction delivers.
“141 Willoughby Street is a rare conversion opportunity, a brand-new, institutionally built tower, which allows the Sponsor to execute a streamlined, largely interior scope of work without the tenancy and structural risks that typically accompany office-to-residential projects,” said Ran Eliasaf, Northwind’s founder and managing partner.
That contrast is worth noting in a city where conversions have run into trouble for exactly those reasons. New York halted a second office-to-residential conversion inside a month this summer, after a scare at the former Pfizer building.
The residential and commercial split
Residents will get an amenity package spread across the cellar and second floor: a fitness center, entertainment lounge, co-working space, wellness center, golf simulator, sports court, games room and children’s playroom, plus landscaped terraces on the 10th and 20th floors and a full-time attended lobby.
The commercial component keeps its own separate entrances and a dedicated elevator bank, with no shared circulation between residential and commercial tenants. Newmark has been retained to market that space. Fogarty Finger, the tower’s original design architect, has been re-engaged as executive architect for the residential conversion. The release describes a construction manager with more than 43 commercial conversions totaling over 14 million square feet and more than 14,500 apartments since 1997, but does not name the firm.
Adam Falk of BH3 Fund Advisors, speaking for the joint venture, said the commercial side is already drawing interest: “With the NYC office market having materially recovered, 385 Gold is seeing significant demand from large users native to Brooklyn as well as Manhattan tenants dealing with escalating occupancy costs for Class A space.”
“The opportunity to reimagine a building the caliber of 141 Willoughby into a thriving mixed-use asset represents a truly unique opportunity in the market today,” said Avi Kollenscher, a partner at Capstone Equities.
Location and timing
The building sits one block east of the Fulton Street retail corridor and two blocks from the MetroTech campus, with 13 subway lines reachable across three stations within roughly a six-minute walk. Northwind says the apartments will deliver into a Downtown Brooklyn market that has absorbed a record wave of new supply over the past several years and whose forward delivery pipeline is set to decline materially. That is the firm’s characterization of the submarket, not an independent finding, and it is the bet underneath the loan: that supply thins out around the time these 239 units hit the market.
Brooklyn’s residential demand has been running hot at the upper end, with Park Slope topping a national ranking of the hottest luxury neighborhoods in August. Institutional capital has also kept moving into the borough’s commercial stock, including an $89.9 million medical office purchase earlier this year.
Rob Turner and Ethan Pond of Eastdil Secured Savills arranged the financing. Northwind was represented by John Vavas of Polsinelli Group; the sponsor was represented by Elizabeth Smith of Goldberg Weprin Finkel Goldstein LLP. The loan came out of Northwind’s discretionary debt fund platform, which the firm says focuses on institutional-quality office-to-residential conversions in New York City and other supply-constrained markets. Founded in 2008, Northwind says it has executed more than $11 billion in transactions across over 400 properties in 28 states.
