Route 40 (https://rtforty.com/category/news/real-estate-report/)
Please see the update posted on Aug. 18, 2022 to last paragraph. The vacant commercial-plus-residential space at 4400 Ventnor Ave, between Bartram and Aberdeen Aves has been tempting us for several years with its “coming soon” signs for a Drip ‘n’ Scoop location. But perhaps it will become less vacant some time soon? The owner, under the business name 4400 Investments, is Robert Idell and family, which owns Drip ‘n’ Scoop and other Ocean City restaurants.
Billionaire investor Carl Icahn appears to be getting ready to sell his remaining Atlantic City property, the Trump Plaza. An Icahn-backed company, IEP AC Plaza, recently paid $3 million for the deed to the long-shuttered casino, according to property documents filed in December. (You can have a look at the docs here and h/t to Reuben Kremer for his ceaseless monitoring of the property records).
Icahn’s conglomerate Icahn Enterprises took control of the Trump Plaza and Trump Taj Mahal when the previous owner, Trump Entertainment Resorts, entered bankruptcy in 2014. Icahn sold the Taj Mahal to a consortium of local investors and Hard Rock International in 2017. But his attempts to sell the Plaza were stymied by the site’s ground lease, which was held by earlier investors and acted as a so-called poison pill to prevent the sale, according to the New York Post.
In Atlantic City’s Lower Chelsea neighborhood, in the blocks around the new Stockton University campus, things are starting to change. Ocean City donut-and-coffee shop Drip n’ Scoop is moving in (at Ventnor and Bartram Aves). Directly across the street it seems as if something is going on behind the boards that shield the burnt-out shell of A&B Market (the city moved to foreclose on the owners of the property earlier this year). And at the corner of Raleigh Ave, a contractor working for an Egg Harbor Township-based dentist has painstakingly renovated the interior of a three-story building and reworked the surrounding stone steps and courtyard. The new outpost of Atlantic Smiles is coming soon, a sign says.
The owner of the Atlantic Club, facing a foreclosure filing, has paid off back-dated taxes and interest from 2017, according to one official familiar with the court proceeding. The tax liens on the aging former casino at the southern end of Atlantic City’s Boardwalk were worth almost $1 million.
The developer behind the planned ‘Orange Loop’ project t0 bring a mixed-use development to a run-down Atlantic City beach block has paid just under $1 million for 11 vacant properties owned by two local businessmen and land owners.
As developers from Asbury Park and closer to home are piling into long-neglected beach blocks in Atlantic City’s downturn, one Tennessee Avenue lot-owner has decided now is the time to sell. The Church of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints has put up for sale a Pacific Avenue-fronting lot directly across from St Nicholas of Tolentine Church.
An Atlantic City beach block between St James Place and Tennessee Avenue should see a third development begin this summer from long-time city businessmen Abraham and Robert Schiff.
Atlantic City’s real estate market has had a relatively busy spring so far. A shell company earlier this month spent $510,000 on an Atlantic City building that includes a Pacific Ave storefront and apartments, the Best Western has a new mortgage and a Stockton donor has acquired two beach-block lots from the Atlantic Club.
