Fancy Plans, at a Pretty Penny

THE million paid last week for an old shuttered school building on nearly four acres in the village of Lawrence may well have amounted to the highest price paid per acre on Long Island, ever.

"I've never heard of anything selling for more than that," said John Pujia, the commercial real estate broker from Greiner-Maltz who handled the sale. Nor had Ron Kleinberg, a broker with Tri-State Properties in Dix Hills who was not involved in the sale; nor, he said, had many other Long Island brokers he talked to.

But once the brokers took a look at the numbers, and the site, they realized that the deal revealed less about price per acre on Long Island than about the number of condominiums per acre that would be permitted on land in a wealthy housing market.

The property, on Central Avenue near the affluent village's downtown area and one block from the Long Island Rail Road station, is zoned for multifamily development. Before the sale was finalized, the village's zoning board of appeals approved increasing the number of units and the height of the building from a maximum of 3 stories and 40 feet to 4 stories and 60 feet.

"There is a need for high-end apartments in the village," said Jack Levenbrown, the village's mayor. "We have people of means who would like to move to a nice condominium in this area."

The developer, David Neuberg, a Lawrence resident, plans 144 luxury condominiums for the site. The bidding war that Mr. Neuberg won involved developers as far away as Chicago and Texas, Mr. Pujia said.

The developer plans to demolish the No. 1 school in August and begin construction in the fall. The new building will be set back about 60 feet behind "lush landscaping," Mr. Neuberg said. It will have full services, including a 24-hour doorman, valet, porters and security staff, a 180-space parking garage for residents and 33 outdoor spaces for visitors, a part-time concierge, an indoor-outdoor pool, a gym and outdoor terraces on every unit.

The pool will have a glass enclosure that slides back in panels, one atop the other, to open it to the summer air. The marble-faced lobby will have two-story ceilings and two curving staircases with wrought-iron railings.

The one-, two- and three-bedroom units will have nine-foot ceilings on the first three floors and a foot more on the top floor. Mr. Neuberg said he planned oak flooring and thick moldings for the units, as well as marble and tile in the bathrooms and high-quality appliances in the kitchens.

The layouts of the units have not been finalized, Mr. Neuberg said, but prices will be over million.

The median price for single-family homes in Lawrence sold so far this year is 2,500, according to the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island. By contrast, the median for the 600 or so mostly older co-op apartments in the village is 4,000.

These numbers tend to support Mayor Levenbrown's view that the area needs luxury condominiums for house-rich residents looking to scale down.

"I definitely think there is a market for it," said Milky Forst of Milky Forst Properties, a 23-year-old real estate firm that specializes in Lawrence and neighboring Cedarhurst. Ms. Forst says she has seen many clients sell their homes to move to maintenance-free communities, one nearby being Meadowbrook Pointe, a partially completed 722-unit condominium complex built on the former Roosevelt Raceway track in Westbury.

Many who are searching for high-end condominiums want to stay in the area to be near children, she added. But they don't want to give up luxury for lower maintenance.

"The amenities, I think, will be an attraction," she said of the new development. "The pool and the luxuriousness of it, if it's done right, will be attractive."

When the property was put up for sale two years ago, there were about a dozen bids close to Mr. Neuberg's, including one offer that exceeded it, Mr. Pujia said. But one of the sticking points was a 2005 moratorium on all construction that would have required a hookup to the village sewage system. Mr. Neuberg was one of the few developers willing to wait until the moratorium was lifted, Mr. Pujia said.

The reason it was imposed in the first place was that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation had found the sewer system to be exceeding capacity during heavy rain or snow, when the storm runoff system would be overwhelmed, according to the village building inspector, Daniel Herron. It took two years to upgrade the 1960s-era treatment system and lift the moratorium.

It was last summer when voters approved the proposal. The actual price for the property was .5 million, Mr. Pujia said, explaining that the extra .5 million was charged when the additional floor was approved by the zoning board of appeals.

Getting the proposal approved by the school board, and by voters, was a major step in completing the sale, Mr. Pujia said. The transaction had been a source of contention, partly because Orthodox Jewish private yeshiva students now outnumber public school pupils in the Lawrence district, even as Orthodox parents maintain a strong presence on the public school board.

The Orthodox parents say they are protecting the interests of their children, who as private school students are legally entitled to busing, special education and other services from public school funds. But their presence on the board has had some public school parents concerned about a lack of resources for their own children.

For these reasons and others, residents and brokers here say, future decisions on how to spend the money from the sale of the school property will be scrutinized. But Murray Forman, the school board president, said the record-breaking sale created "plenty of proceeds to make the rational people in both camps happy."