Why Kingswood Center on Kings Highway in Midwood Changed

If you've walked or driven along Kings Highway near the B and Q station any time in the last few years, you've probably clocked the building next to T.J. Maxx that never quite fills up. Storefronts sit dark behind paper-covered glass. A leasing sign has hung in the same window through more than one change of season. Meanwhile, three blocks away, Target and Marshalls keep pulling in carts full of shoppers like nothing's wrong over there at all.

Both buildings sit on the same commercial stretch of Kings Highway. Both were bought by the same investor in the same month. Only one of them just changed hands again, this time for a third of what it was worth six years ago.

Same Owner, Same Month, Two Different Fates

In February 2020, Infinity Real Estate and Nightingale Properties sold their Kingswood shopping portfolio to Urban Edge Properties for $165 million. The portfolio was really two separate buildings on the same corridor: Kingswood Center at 1630 East 15th Street, home to T.J. Maxx, New York Sports Club, and the Visiting Nurse Service, and Kingswood Crossing about three blocks away at 1715 East 13th Street, anchored by Target and Marshalls.

Kingswood Center alone cost Urban Edge about $89 million, or $394 per square foot, at the time of that purchase. It was, by any measure, a confident bet on one of Brooklyn's busiest shopping corridors.

Here's the split that matters. Urban Edge still owns Kingswood Crossing today. Kingswood Center is a different story entirely.

What Went Wrong at 1630 East 15th Street

The timing was brutal. Urban Edge closed on Kingswood Center weeks before the city's first COVID cases. New York Sports Club, one of the building's anchor tenants, filed for bankruptcy protection and vacated its lease 12 and a half years ahead of schedule that November. A second-floor office tenant, VTA Management Services, gave up its space in December 2022.

By spring 2023, Urban Edge had missed a payment on the $66 million commercial mortgage-backed securities loan it had assumed to buy the building, and Wells Fargo, acting as trustee, moved to foreclose. Occupancy at Kingswood Center had fallen to roughly 35 percent, and the property's annual net operating income had dropped to about $1.9 million, according to reporting at the time from The Real Deal. Ownership passed to Midland Loan Services, a PNC Bank unit, which spent the past few years marketing the building for sale while Lincoln Property tried to fill it.

That's the arc that ended this July: Midland sold Kingswood Center to Michael Berfield's Bridges Development Group for $31 million, a steep markdown from the $89 million Urban Edge paid in 2020. Roughly 100,000 square feet, close to half the building, is still listed as available for office, medical, or retail use.

None of that happened three blocks away. Kingswood Crossing, sitting in the same dense pocket of Midwood with close to a million residents within three miles, kept its anchors and never landed in foreclosure court. Same corridor, same owner at the outset, same subway line. One building's finances unraveled and the other's didn't.

What Never Left

Here's the part that complicates the "Kings Highway retail is struggling" read some people might reach for. T.J. Maxx never left. The chain has occupied its space at Kingswood Center since 2010, and according to receiver Yanni Marmarou, who managed the property during the foreclosure process, the company considers the location one of its most profitable stores. The Visiting Nurse Service of New York, ElderServe Health, and Mount Sinai's New York Eye and Ear Infirmary have also stayed put through the entire ownership churn.

So the empty storefronts you've been walking past aren't a verdict on whether people shop and get care on Kings Highway. They're a reflection of a debt structure that assumed rents and lease renewals that didn't materialize on schedule, layered onto a very specific piece of bad timing in early 2020.

The New Owner's Bet

Bridges Development Group isn't new to this kind of situation. Michael Berfield founded the firm in 2017, and it deals mostly in mid-to-large commercial properties around New York. A year before the Kingswood Center deal, Bridges bought a 290,400-square-foot shopping center in Gravesend for $11.1 million, another building that needed re-tenanting rather than fresh construction.

To close on Kingswood Center, Bridges secured $34.65 million in acquisition financing, arranged by JLL's Scott Aiese and Alex Staikos. According to JLL, that financing is meant to let Bridges execute a value-add plan: invest in the property and lease up the vacant space rather than hold it as-is. Lincoln Property, the leasing agent, is marketing the roughly 100,000 vacant square feet for a mix of office, medical, and retail tenants, the same categories that have kept the rest of the building occupied through six turbulent years.

What This Could Mean for the Corridor

Nobody has announced specific tenants yet, and there's no public timeline for when the dark storefronts might light back up. But the building itself has good bones for it. It sits directly above a parking garage with 257 spaces, right near the Kings Highway station on the B and Q lines, in the same stretch of corridor that supports a fully leased Target and Marshalls three blocks over.

For people who live nearby, a successful re-leasing effort would likely mean new services, brighter storefronts, and more local jobs on a stretch of Kings Highway that residents already rely on for daily errands. It wouldn't change the fact that T.J. Maxx has quietly been one of the more successful stores on the block the whole time, foreclosure and all.

The next time you pass that half-lit building on your way to the subway, you'll at least know the mystery isn't about the neighborhood. It's about one loan, one bad year to close a deal, and a new owner betting that the fix is a matter of paperwork and patience rather than demand.

If you're curious about how commercial shifts like this one tend to ripple into home values and rental demand nearby, or you just want to talk through what's changing in Midwood, Binnie Sen is always happy to have that conversation. Let's Talk About Your Next Move.