Singaporean hotel developers Satinder Garcha and Harpreet Bedi are looking for a taker for their West Village home.
The husband-and-wife team has listed 84 Jane St., a 6,000-square-foot townhouse near Washington Street, for $30 million, according to an ad that appeared this week.
Garcha, chairman of the Garcha Group, which owns boutique lodgings in Singapore and South America, and Bedi, the CEO of the firm, paid $7.9 million for the townhouse in 2007 and so could realize a tidy profit.
But they also appear to have made significant investments in the stylish, 24-foot-wide, red-brick property, which features six bedrooms, a living room with walnut floors and a gas fireplace, and a bluestone-lined backyard, plus a top-floor primary suite that has angled windows that recall a greenhouse.
Born near the Himalayas in India and educated in computer science in Texas, Garcha headed to Silicon Valley after graduation just as the dot-com boom was starting to rumble, according to magazine profiles and a company biography.
A firm he co-founded in 1995, people.com, a sort of classified-ad-type service to help California startups connect with Indian engineers (and that had nothing to do with People magazine) was eventually snapped up by the parent of monster.com for $115 million in 2000, just before the tech market crashed.
Garcha then relocated to Singapore, where he launched Elevation Developments, a builder of high-end villas tailored to executives new to Singapore looking for places to rent while they got the lay of the land. A designer of some of those villas, Manhattan-based architect Jonathan Schloss, also styled 84 Jane, according to Forbes.
Bedi, meanwhile, was trained as a lawyer and has also produced a documentary film, Under the Turban, about life as a Sikh.
In 2015, Bedi and Garcha co-founded the Garcha Group, which was around the time Forbes ranked Garcha as one of Singapore’s wealthiest people.
If No. 84 were to trade at its current asking price, it would be something of a high-water mark in the townhouse sector, which has struggled along with the larger residential real estate market despite recent inklings of strength.
In the first quarter of this year, the average sale price of Manhattan townhouses, including versions with more than one unit, was about $8 million, up about 10% in a year, according to data from Leslie J. Garfield, a townhouse-focused brokerage.
And the gains were even bigger in Greenwich Village and the West Village, the firm said; the average sale price in those downtown neighborhoods was about $24 million, up 67% in a year, though some of that surge is likely due to the stunning $73 million transaction in January involving 138-140 W. 11th St., a 10,800-square-foot combined property near Seventh Avenue.
Abigail Agranat, the Douglas Elliman agent marking 84 Jane, did not reply to an email by press time. And a message sent to the Garcha Group’s Singapore office also went unreturned.
C. J. Hughes , 2024-05-23 19:33:32
Source link
