The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has signed a contract to sell a long-vacant development site at 3229 Far Rockaway Blvd. for $8 million, public filings show.
The buyer, Walton Realty NY LLC, is based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, at an address commonly associated with real estate investor Herman Jacobowitz.
The sale was recently approved by the New York State Attorney General’s Office, a standard requirement when nonprofits and religious organizations sell significant assets in New York State.
The church acquired the 44,299-square-foot parcel in 2002 with plans to build a meetinghouse, but the site remained undeveloped. In 2019, John Bezzant of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints filed plans with the New York City Department of Buildings to construct a one-story, 6,022-square-foot assembly building. The project was never permitted and construction never began.
The property near Bayswater Park is zoned R6 for residential development, has 259 feet of frontage and a depth of 225 feet. Under R6 zoning regulations, developers can build up to 2.43 times the lot size in residential floor area. The city’s most recent designated market value for the site, assessed in 2022, was $2.8 million.
City records show the site has not received any major building code violations over the past year, and there have been no lawsuits or bankruptcies associated with the property within the past 24 months.
The sale comes as broader Far Rockaway experiences a surge in new development, with 1.7 million square feet of commercial and multifamily construction underway over the past two years, accounting for 13% of the neighborhood’s total built space. However, the area immediately surrounding 3229 Far Rockaway Blvd. has remained relatively quiet; this marks the first significant commercial real estate transaction within a 400-foot radius in the past two years.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, founded in 1830, operates hundreds of meetinghouses and temples across the United States but has increasingly consolidated or sold underutilized properties in urban areas as local congregations shift.
