Real estate execs exchange $9 million Midwood home

A small neighborhood in Midwood has scored another big sale. 

Real estate developer Joseph Sutton, an executive at his father Jeff Sutton’s Wharton Properties, spent $9.5 million on a single-family home at 935 East Ninth Street, Crain’s reported. The sale is the largest in the area this year, according to StreetEasy.

The 4,100-square-foot house was sold by Marvin and Barbara Azrak, who purchased it in 2015 for $2.1 million and comprehensively renovated it. Azrak is the managing principal of real estate investment firm Maguire Capital Group, which he founded in 2013.

The sale is one in a growing number in the area to register prices that are more typical of renovated row houses on the brownstone-lined streets of Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights.

Last month, a 4,000-square-foot home on the same East Ninth Street block sold for $7 million. Property records show that the home had not traded hands since 1985, when it fetched just $450,000.

Both homes appeared to be off-market deals, which is not atypical for an area that is host to a significant Syrian Jewish population. Many of the sales, which are routinely in the $4 million or $5 million range, occur between community members without a listing appearing on StreetEasy or anywhere else.

The largest deals in the area seem to center around a handful of real estate families.

In 2022, Jeff Sutton, the founder of Wharton, set the benchmark for sales in the area when he purchased 2088 East Third Street in nearby Gravesend for $14 million. The sellers were yet another real estate dynasty, the Cheras, whose firm is Crown Acquisitions.

Two years ago, a trust tied to Marvin Azrak sold a single-family home at 2003 East Third Street for $11 million to an undisclosed buyer.

And last year the Sitt family moved two homes for $12 million apiece.

In July, Marilyn Sitt, owner of real estate investment firm Sitt Asset Management, sold a property at 509 Avenue S for $12 million. Five months later her son David, an executive with the real estate investment firm Status Capital, sold a home less than three blocks away for $12.2 million.

The limited number of homes available within walking distance of certain synagogues important in the Syrian Jewish community has helped drive prices up, as have substantial renovations of formerly humble houses.

The Suttons’ firm has made several splashy deals of its own this year, selling two Fifth Avenue retail properties to Prada for $822 million and another site to Gucci parent company Kering for $963 million.