A Landlord, Not a Developer, Paid $95M for a Lowenbrau Family Lot

The family that built Lowenbrau into an American beer brand has sold its Long Island City holding at 10-01 45th Road for a reported $95 million, and the buyer is not a developer. Ground Lease REIT, an affiliate of Dallas-based Montgomery Street Partners, is a ground lessor. It buys the dirt under projects and leases it back on 99-year terms. City records identify the parcel as Queens block 50, lot 1: an 80,000 sq ft site running 400 feet along 45th Road at Vernon Boulevard, carrying a two-story, 90,000 sq ft building put up in 1931.

Why it matters

Our pull of ACRIS pushes the family’s hold back past the reported 58 years. The earliest digitized document on the lot is a January 14, 1966 mortgage recorded by Hans Holterbosch Inc., which makes the recorded interest roughly 60 years, and ACRIS digitization begins in 1966, so the original purchase may sit outside the file. A 1968 deed moved the lot from the company to H. Dieter Holterbosch, and a deed recorded in December 2007 moved it to DH Vernon LLC. That LLC, care of Hans Holterbosch Inc., is the owner PLUTO still lists.

The site is also already empty. ACRIS carries an April 2005 memorandum of lease to New York Blood Center, whose Vernon Boulevard lab ran here until it consolidated into a Rye campus in March 2025. A ground lessor buying a just-vacated, under-built lot is buying optionality, not in-place income.

The numbers

• $1,188 per sq ft of land: our figure, $95 million across the 80,000 sq ft lot
• About $396 per buildable sq ft: our figure, at the 3.0 residential FAR PLUTO lists, or 240,000 sq ft. The lot is split-zoned M1-2A/R6A and M1-3A/R7X, so the R7X portion carries more and the real basis is lower
• 150,000 sq ft unused: built FAR is 1.13 against the 3.0 permitted
• About $238 million: our figure for implied project capitalization, since Ground Lease REIT markets its leases at up to 40 percent of a cap stack
• $5,171,850: total assessed value on the lot, against the reported price

What’s next

No DOB NOW filing exists on the lot, so there is no plan of record. Two constraints will shape whatever comes. The lot carries environmental designation E-848, which forces testing and remediation before residential use, and the split zoning means any plan has to be drawn across two districts. For New York sponsors the read is blunt: ground-lease capital is now bidding for Hunters Point land at prices developers used to set, in the same submarket where agency debt just cleared $115 million on a stabilized LIC tower.