Ground Lease Condos in NYC: What You're Really Buying

Updated Oct 12, 2026 · 13 min read

Same Kind of Lease, Very Different Terms

Two Brooklyn Bridge Park condos sit on the same kind of public land lease and end in opposite ways. At One Brooklyn Bridge Park, the condo board can buy the land for $1 when the 99-year lease runs out. At Quay Tower, the plan says there is "no right to a renewal term." In Battery Park City, ground rent resets to 6% of the land's appraised value on set dates, and at The Visionaire the lease payments are about 57% of first-year common charges.

In a ground lease building, someone else owns the land, usually a public authority, and the building leases it. You still get a deed to your apartment, but what you own is a leasehold: the apartment for as long as the lease lasts.

Where You'll Find Ground Lease Condos

In NYC, ground leases are most common on land the state or city set aside for redevelopment:

• Battery Park City, where the land is owned by the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA).
• Brooklyn Bridge Park, where buildings like One Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pierhouse and Quay Tower lease their land from the park's public landlord.
• Queens West in Long Island City, where buildings like The View at East Coast lease from the Queens West Development Corporation.

The legal name for these is a "leasehold condominium." The offering plans call the Battery Park City and Brooklyn Bridge Park versions "qualified leasehold condominiums," a category the state's Condominium Act allows for land leased from named public bodies such as the Battery Park City Authority, with at least 50 years left on the lease when the declaration is recorded (Real Property Law §339-e).

How Common Are They?

Not very. In our records, about a dozen condo plans sit in Battery Park City, Brooklyn Bridge Park and Queens West, filed between 2006 and 2021. Outside those areas, condos on a ground lease are unusual: buyers and lenders prefer owning the land, so private developers almost always build condos on land they own.

Ground leases are more common in co-ops. Many co-ops built in the 1960s to 1980s sit on land owned by someone else. Habitat magazine counted about 100 "land-lease co-ops" in the city in 2024, with about 25,000 shareholders. Some of them have had steep rent increases when their leases came up for renewal (more below).

Are new condos still being built on ground leases?

Rarely. The newest new-construction example we found is Quay Tower, filed in 2019 on one of the last residential sites at Brooklyn Bridge Park. We searched the condo plans filed from 2021 through 2025 that we have the full text of, about 1,150 of them, and found no new building on a ground lease. The only leasehold plan in that group was The Solaire, an existing Battery Park City rental converted to a co-op. Battery Park City and Brooklyn Bridge Park have little or no land left for new homes, so new ground lease condos are unlikely to become common soon.

New buildings on leased land haven't stopped, though; they're sold as co-ops. The biggest is Brooklyn Point at City Point in Downtown Brooklyn, filed in 2016: a "leasehold cooperative" plan for 458 residences, offered at $898,209,000 in total, in the residential unit of a condominium on ground-leased land (cover page). 1228 Madison Avenue (filed in 2019, on a 150-year lease) and 201 East 23rd Street (filed in 2024) are leasehold co-ops too. Like Brooklyn Point, 201 East 23rd Street is a two-unit leasehold condominium, and a co-op owns the residential unit.

Why Do Ground Leases Exist?

A ground lease splits a property in two: one party owns the land, another owns the building on it for a set number of years. Each side gets something it couldn't get from a sale.

What the landowner gets

• Income without selling. The owner keeps the land and collects rent for decades, and the land and building come back at the end. That suits owners who want to hold land for the long term: families, estates, institutions and public agencies.
• Control. The lease can decide what gets built and how it's used. The ground lease for 48 Bond Street, a co-op, goes as far as forbidding a condominium (more on that below).
• For a government landowner, a way to pay for public goals. In Battery Park City and Brooklyn Bridge Park, the land was set aside for redevelopment, and the rent and PILOT from the buildings are an ongoing source of money for the public landowner instead of a one-time sale price.

What the developer gets

• A site that isn't for sale. Some of the best-located land in the city is owned by people or agencies that won't sell. Leasing is the only way to build there.
• Less money up front. Instead of paying for the land on day one, the developer pays rent over time. That leaves more of the budget for the building itself.

Why the buyer ends up with a co-op so often

Once the building is finished, the developer has to sell homes on land it doesn't own. In the public waterfront areas, the state's Condominium Act allows "qualified leasehold condominiums," so those buildings sold condos. Elsewhere, developers on leased land have usually filed co-op plans: the co-op corporation takes over the lease as a single tenant, and buyers own shares. The 48 Bond Street ground lease says the tenant may not create a condominium but may convert the building "to cooperative form of ownership," and the 2007 plan for Azure, on East 91st Street, says a leasehold condo there would need the Condominium Act to be amended. We go through these filings in why developers are still filing new co-ops.

That's why ground leases are much more common under co-ops than condos, and why the newest leasehold buildings we found are co-ops, not condos.

The 10 most recent ground lease plans

These are the 10 most recent leasehold residential offering plans in our records, from 2021 back to 2007. Almost all are in Battery Park City, Brooklyn Bridge Park and Queens West, and several are rentals converted to ownership rather than new buildings.

Leasehold residential offering plans in our records, newest first, by the date the Attorney General accepted the plan (or, for a plan never accepted, the date it was filed). Homes: the residential units in the plan.

Older leasehold plans in our records include One Brooklyn Bridge Park and The Visionaire, both discussed below.

How Ground Rent Shows Up in Your Monthly Costs

After the first sale closes, the condo board becomes the tenant under the ground lease. It collects each owner's share of the rent, which plans call Proportionate Rent, as part of common charges and passes it to the landowner.

At The Visionaire in Battery Park City, that share covers base rent, PILOT and "civic facilities" payments. In the first-year budget, those three lines add up to about $5 million of an $8.7 million budget, or about 57% of common charges. The co-op conversion at The Solaire, also in Battery Park City, budgets almost exactly the same share: about $6.3 million of $11 million.

Good to know: because PILOT replaces your property taxes, comparing common charges alone makes these buildings look expensive. Compare common charges plus taxes instead.

The Solaire is a co-op, so its owners pay maintenance rather than common charges, but the lease payments work the same way.

How Ground Rent Goes Up

The first-year budget shows only today's rent. The lease decides what comes next, and the plans we read use two kinds of increases.

Fixed increases. The rent rises by a set percentage on a set schedule, so you can work out every future year in advance.

• At One Brooklyn Bridge Park, base rent starts at $1,250,000 a year and rises 3% a year, compounded, from the third anniversary on.
• At Quay Tower, base rent is $597,000 a year from 2019 and rises 7.5% every five years, compounded. That works out to about 1.5% a year.

Resets to the land's value. In Battery Park City, the rent is reset on set dates to 6% of the land's fair market value, decided by appraisal, or kept at the old rent if that's higher. Between resets, it rises every five years by the greater of 15% or inflation (CPI). Fifteen percent every five years is about 2.8% a year.

• The Visionaire's resets fall in 2031, 2046 and 2061.
• The Solaire's fall in 2024, 2039 and 2054. Before its first reset, its rent was rising about 2% a year, from $249,113 to $269,647. The plan says the sponsor expects the rent to "increase substantially" at the first reset, but makes no promise about how much.

Resets are where the risk is, because no one knows what the land will be worth decades from now. Land-lease co-ops show how big a reset can be: at Carnegie House, a co-op at 100 West 57th Street, Bisnow reported in 2022 that the ground rent was set to jump from about $4.4 million to about $26 million a year at its 2025 reset.

Tip: find the next reset date in the lease summary. If it falls while you expect to own the apartment, plan for your monthly costs to rise sharply that year.

What Happens When the Lease Ends?

This is the most important question, and the answer differs from building to building.

• A $1 buyout. At One Brooklyn Bridge Park, when the 99-year lease ends, the landlord must sell the land to the condo board, and the board has the right to buy it, for $1, as long as the rent is paid up.
• A $1 option, decades early. At Brooklyn Point, the co-op has the right to buy its unit from the landlord at any time from July 1, 2031 to June 30, 2055. The sponsor prepays $1,397,758 of the price, leaving $1 for the co-op to pay (p. 10).
• No right to stay. At Quay Tower, also in Brooklyn Bridge Park, the lease expires in 2109 and the plan says there is "no right to a renewal term." Owners would have to give up their units.
• Negotiate or leave. The Visionaire's lease expires on June 17, 2069. By then the board has to negotiate a new lease or buy the land. If it can't, the plan says owners lose the right to stay in their apartments. The View at East Coast's lease runs to September 30, 2102, with no renewal option.

The Solaire's lease ends on the same day as The Visionaire's, June 17, 2069, and also has no renewal option.

The plans make no promises here. The Visionaire's plan says no representation is made "as to whether the Lease will be extended or renewed."

Why the Years Left on the Lease Matter

A leasehold apartment loses value as the end date approaches. The plans say so directly: The View at East Coast warns that "as the Lease term diminishes, the value of the Units diminishes," and that financing can get harder.

Lenders care because your apartment secures the loan. Fannie Mae requires the lease to run at least five years past the loan's maturity, so a 30-year mortgage needs 35 years left on the lease. With 40-plus years left, that's rarely a problem. When fewer years are left, it can narrow your pool of buyers when you sell.

Tip: work out how many years will be left when you plan to sell, not just today.

Other Things the Landowner Controls

• The lease wins. At The Visionaire, if the lease and the condo's own rules disagree, the lease controls.
• Exterior changes. Leases can limit changes to the building's height, bulk or facade.
• Board defaults. If one owner stops paying, that alone usually isn't a default on the lease. But if the board fails to pass the collected rent to the landowner, the lease can be terminated. That's a good reason to care how well the building is run.

What to Check in the Offering Plan

• The lease expiration date, and whether there's a renewal option or a right to buy the land.
• The "Summary of the Lease" section, especially how rent changes over time: fixed increases or resets to the land's value, and when the next one falls.
• Schedule B, the first-year budget, for base rent, PILOT and other lease payments.
• The Special Risks section near the front, where the ground lease risks are spelled out.
• Any amendments that changed the lease. See how to find offering plan amendments.

Search "ground lease" on The Condo Book Project to find other buildings, and compare costs on the common charge benchmarks. For how budgets work, see Schedule A and Schedule B.

Related: Why Are Developers Still Filing New Co-ops in NYC? · How Much Should NYC Condo Common Charges Be?