Thomas Breen photo
50 Liberty: Another new owner, another sale way above tax appraisal.
A Fairfield County investor has purchased a three-family house on Liberty Street for $492,500, marking that property’s fourth sale in as many years.
The seller sold it for $182,000 more than he paid for it — while the city taxes it as if it’s worth half as much as the actual sale price.
The three-and-a-quarter-story rental property at 50 Liberty St. stands on a side street a block away from Trowbridge Square in the Hill.
According to a warranty deed posted to the city’s land records database last Tuesday, Joel Douglas Hall and Julie Varghese Hall of Riverside, Conn. bought 50 Liberty St. for $492,500 from Keter 2 LLC, a holding company controlled by Abraham Taichman of Cedarhurst, N.Y.
The city last appraised that property for tax purposes as worth $217,900 — or less than half of what it sold for last Tuesday.
This is the fourth time since 2021 that 50 Liberty St. has sold, at prices that keep climbing and climbing and climbing.
The first three sales all took place in September 2021.
Back then, the property first sold for $124,750 — from Theodore Stelmaszczyk to William Hawthorn’s Connecticut Homes R Us LLC.
Hawthorn’s company then flipped 50 Liberty for $238,000 to JSA Realty LLC, a holding company controlled by Shneor Edelkopf and Ariel Mangami.
Edelkopf and Mangami’s company then flipped the property for $310,000 to Taichman’s Keter 2 LLC. (Taichman’s company bought the property with the help of a $248,000 mortgage loan from the Manhattan-based Loan Funder LLC. At the time, the property’s city tax appraisal was just $121,600. City land records show Taichman’s company paid off that mortgage by June 2023.)
Now, three and a half years after buying the property, Taichman’s company has sold 50 Liberty St. for $492,500 to the Halls, who took out a $369,350 mortgage loan from the Danbury-based Union Savings Bank to make that purchase.
50 Liberty St. sits in one of New Haven’s “Enterprise Zones”—a state tax incentive program designed to target investment towards economically “distressed” areas like the Hill . All of these sales have been exempt from the state’s real estate conveyance tax.
That means that Connecticut gave Taichman’s company what amounts to a $3,693 tax break as part of 50 Liberty’s latest transaction. (The sale was still subject to a municipal real estate conveyance tax of $1,930.)
State court records show that Taichman’s company evicted two different sets of tenants, both for nonpayment of the rent, over the course of its ownership of 50 Liberty. New Haven’s CitySquared website shows no building permits pulled during that time for repairs or improvements to the building. That online database does, however, show various resolved housing complaints investigated by LCI — around “interior maintenance” (November 221, December 2021, February 2021, September 2022), “fire safety” (September 2022), and “heat” (January 2024).
New owner Joel Hall: “In terms of the price being more than the appraisal, in all honesty, I see that everywhere.”
The new owner, Joel Hall, is a Greenwich-based landlord who works for Christofor Realty and runs a property management company called Gate & Gable.
“As a small-time investor (and as any investor will tell you), I’m just running the numbers to see if the deal makes sense from a ROI [return on investment] perspective,” Hall told the Independent when asked why he bought 50 Liberty. “In this case, based on the income (rents) and expenses, the deal made sense at this price.”
He said he doesn’t have any specific plans for the property. “Time will tell. There are tenants in place that seem generally happy.”
As for the condition of 50 Liberty, he said the property was inspected as part of the sale “and it’s in good shape. I don’t have any knowledge of what the previous owner did, just knowledge of the current state.”
Hall added that he “looked for months for investment opportunities in New Haven” before finding 50 Liberty. “As a landlord my goal is always to have a positive relationship with the tenants and provide them a nice place to live.”
Why was he looking in New Haven in particular?
Hall said he wanted to buy a rental properties within an hour’s drive of where he lives in the Stamford area. He looked in Norwalk, Danbury, and Derby/Ansonia, too. “I narrowed in on New Haven when I found a couple of options where the numbers started to make sense.”
What does he make of the sizable gap between the city’s tax appraisal of $217,900 and the sale price of $492,500?
“In terms of the price being more than the appraisal, in all honesty, I see that everywhere,” Hall said. “I was looking at a place in Norwalk last Fall where the Appraisal was $400,000 and it was listed for $750,000. As to why, my assumption is the cities have their formulas that they use. I don’t know.”
He noted that, ever since Covid, real estate has gotten more and more expensive in Connecticut — especially the closer you get to New York City.
“New Haven properties are more affordable,” he concluded, “and offer a lot of great advantages like a world-class college, well-connected transit and the best pizza in the country!”
Laura Glesby photo
Acting Assessor Alex Pullen: "Time will tell in 2026 during the next revaluation if sales in the neighborhood justify the nearly half a million-dollar sale, or if the buyer overpaid."
50 Liberty, at left.
Asked for a comment on the city tax appraisal-sale price gap, city Acting Assessor Alex Pullen noted, as Hall told the Independent, 50 Liberty’s new owner is looking at the property “an an investment, determining what monthly income he can generate after expenses in order to determine what it is worth to him.”
Pullen said that New Haven does not use the “income approach” when valuing three-family residences like 50 Liberty as part of the “Mass Appraisal” process.
Instead, the current $217,900 tax appraisal — which is effectively the city’s estimate of what the property would be worth on the open market, and which is a key factor in determining the property’s local tax burden — is based on “sales of comparable properties in similar neighborhoods during the year leading up to” October 2021, which is when the last citywide revaluation took place.
“Time will tell in 2026 during the next revaluation if sales in the neighborhood justify the nearly half a million-dollar sale, or if the buyer overpaid.”
Pullen added that assessors use the income approach for commercial, industrial, mixed-use or residential properties of six units or more, as consistent with Connecticut General Statute 12 – 63b, “which allows us to request income and expense information from these properties. We do not request income and expense information for three family properties as there are sufficient multi-family sales in New Haven to establish a market.”
School-To-Apts Sold For $2.2M
456 Lombard, under new ownership.
Meanwhile, the sale of 50 Liberty isn’t the only local property transaction Taichman engaged in last week.
According to a warranty deed posted to the city land records database last Thursday, Keter Plus LLC, another holding company controlled by Taichman, spent $2.2 million buying the 16-unit apartment building at 456 Lombard St. in Fair Haven from 16 Lombard LLC, a holding company controlled by Woodbridge’s Amit Lakhotia.
Taichman’s company bought the property, which used to be the Ezekiel Cheever School, with the help of a $1.92 million mortgage loan from the New Jersey-based BD Capital SE LLC.
That Lombard Street property last sold for $1.36 million in 2018. The city most recently appraised it for tax purposes as worth $1,548,900 — or roughly $650,000 less than Taichman’s company paid for it.