Press

When Miki Naftali announced his plans for the sprawling waterfront project dubbed Williamsburg Wharf, it was a pivot from the developer who had been making hay with quick-selling boutique developments dotting Uptown Manhattan.

But similar to his pandemic-era bet on the supply-constrained Upper East Side, Naftali, who partnered with Access Industries on the project, appears to have struck another chord on the other side of the East River.

One Williamsburg Wharf, the 89-unit condo component, is now over 50 percent sold, according to Serhant founder and CEO Ryan Serhant, who launched sales this past fall with Serhant New Development Group.

Naftali likens the project to an “urban resort,” with amenities including a rooftop outdoor pool, a basketball court, a fitness center with a yoga and meditation room and a pet spa.

“The level of quality for the building — it has a porte-cochere, which just doesn’t exist in Williamsburg, a private cinema, a restaurant — it’s got a level of amenity you just don’t get in Brooklyn,” he said.

So far, buyers appear to have responded, even if they’re experiencing the amenities through a miniaturized model of the tower on display in the building’s sales gallery, less than 20 blocks up the road on Kent Avenue.

One Williamsburg Wharf is currently the top-selling building citywide, according to Marketproof’s Kael Goodman, and it “could be pretty much spoken for by the end of the year” if the current momentum continues.

Serhant said the sales progress and numbers for a pre-construction building in Brooklyn has been particularly impressive, with a number of buyers from Manhattan using the building to make the interborough leap. Construction is expected to be complete during the third quarter of this year.

An undisclosed buyer at One Williamsburg Wharf set a neighborhood sponsor sale record with their $7.2 million penthouse purchase, which comes out to over $2,700 per square foot.

The sale unseated the previous record-holder, a $5.8 million penthouse at Two Trees’ One Domino Square, which sits just a few blocks up the street.

That project, which launched sales almost one year ago, has had a slightly slower go of things — albeit with almost double the units — with 59 of its 160 condo units sold.

“There are other buildings that have units for sale [or] resale, except people go and see them, and then they come here and they buy here,” Serhant said of the competition in the area.

There may be enough demand to go around for both developments — and then some.

Prices in North Brooklyn have spiked this quarter — the average price per square foot for condos in North Brooklyn shot up over 26 percent year-over-year to $1,436, according to Miller Samuel’s Brooklyn sales report for the first three months of 2025.

New development sales in North Brooklyn reached levels “not seen in over a decade” in 2024, according to Ryan Schleis, senior vice president of analytics and research at Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group. According to Corcoran’s market report for the first quarter of 2025, median new development prices in North Brooklyn, which does not include the pre-closing Williamsburg Wharf, jumped 43 percent to almost $2 million, driven by One Domino Square and The Huron in Greenpoint.

Closings are expected to begin in a few months, according to Serhant, and rental leasing for the two towers at Two and Three Williamsburg Wharf began several weeks ago.

Last month, Israeli celebrity chef Eyal Shani inked a 4,000-square-foot lease for his restaurant group, Good People Group, on the ground floor of the master-planned community, the first retail lease signed at the 3.75-acre site.