GARDEN CITY, NY-Just six years after purchasing a vacant pharmaceutical plant in Garden City, Metropolitan Realty Associates and Angelo, Gordon & Co. have sold the facility for a tidy profit. The 188,500-square-foot complex sold at auction last fall to real estate investor David Werner and Carlton Associates for $39.25 million, or $208 per square foot. The deal closed Thursday.

Joseph Farkas, president of MRA, tells GlobeSt.com that the sale was the result of the successful--and extensive--redevelopment of a no-longer useful building. “It was a gut renovation,” he says. “We brought the building back to its concrete slabs and foundations and exterior walls and rebuilt it. We got new mechanical systems, fire safety, plumbing, air conditioning, electric distribution--everything.”

Located at 1000 Stewart Ave. and 500 Endo Blvd., the complex was bought from Bristol Myers Squibb in 2005 for $7.4 million. Following the gut renovation Farkas describes, it was leased to long-term tenants like Lifetime Brands Inc. and Nassau Community College. Those tenants and the facility’s 100 percent occupancy made it attractive to the buyers, Farkas says. Other factors also proved favorable.

“There’s always strong demand based on the great housing and the great labor pool,” Farkas says. “Many of the large businesses are in the central Nassau County office submarket and I think there’s a tremendous amount of debt in the market and pent up investment dollars looking to be invested in stable real estate assets and my business is to redevelop and take no longer useful buildings are create them into stable assets and that’s what we did here.”

According to Cushman & Wakefield’s Long Island Office Report for Q1 2011, the market the property sits in saw no new construction completed or begun year to date. Meanwhile, leasing activity was forecasted to increase.