550 Vanderbilt Avenue
550 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11238
Prospect Heights, Brooklyn
BBL 3011297501 · BIN 3418187
- Year built
- 2015
- Type
- Condominium
- Units
- 278
- Floors
- 18
- Landmark
- No
- Flip tax
- none disclosed in the offering plan or recorded house rules; sponsor-era closings carried a Working Capital Fund contribution plus a separate Resident Manager's Unit payment; board sets move and lease-review fees
- Subletting
- permitted; one-year minimum lease; entire unit only; subject to Board right of first refusal; no transient/short-term occupancy; leases and renewals must be filed with the managing agent (house rules 39)
- Pied-à-terre
- permitted (standard condominium)
- Washer / dryer
- washer and dryer in every residence per the offering plan; cellar laundry room with five washers/five dryers pay-per-use
- Pets
- max two domestic dogs, cats, caged birds or fish per unit; nuisance removal on one week's notice; $50 fine for unleashed animals in public areas (house rules 13)
Compiled by The Roebling Research Desk from the building’s offering plan, amendments, and related building documents (primary source dated 2022 (Twentieth Amendment)). Reported and subject to confirmation. Board policies can change by amendment — confirm at the offer stage.
550 Vanderbilt is the only building at Pacific Park you can buy an apartment in, and that single fact organizes everything else about it. The other towers standing on the site today — the Dean Street and Carlton Avenue buildings, the Pacific Street tower — are rental product, some of it entirely income-restricted. The 278-unit condominium at Vanderbilt and Dean was carved out of the master plan as the for-sale component, filed with the Department of Law in June 2015, and sold through to a resident-controlled board. Buyers who want ownership on this site have exactly one address to consider, and sellers here compete with no in-project inventory at all.
The design is the second thing worth understanding. CookFox took a commission that could easily have read as the first move in a tower cluster and instead pointed it back at Prospect Heights. The street wall holds at roughly 60 feet — brownstone-block height — before the massing begins a staged retreat of terraces and setbacks toward the park edge. The brick is custom-fired against the surrounding 19th-century masonry rather than specified from a catalogue; the windows sit inside deep shrouds that give the façade shadow and depth; planters are built into the elevation rather than added to it, and elevator vestibules are day-lit on every floor with views out to the open space. The building reads as an edge condition — a hinge between the rowhouse district and whatever eventually rises over the rail yard.
The third fact is Atlantic Yards, and it deserves to be said plainly rather than managed. The site has been under state supervision since 2003 as a project that promised 2,250 affordable apartments; the deadline for delivering the last 876 of them passed on May 31, 2025 without them being built. Greenland USA defaulted on $286 million in EB-5 loans, and in October 2025 a joint venture of Cirrus Workforce Housing and LCOR took over as the third master developer, negotiating a $12 million penalty that housing advocates have publicly called inadequate. That team has since unveiled a roughly $5 billion completion plan — Kohn Pedersen Fox as master plan architect, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates on landscape — proposing seven further towers, about 8.5 acres of continuous open space and some 5,600 additional apartments, with environmental review projected to begin around September 2026 and construction no earlier than 2028. Six remaining parcels sit over the MTA's Vanderbilt Yard and cannot be built until a platform is financed and constructed; the state has committed roughly $700 million toward it.
For an owner at 550 Vanderbilt, that history cuts in more than one direction, and an honest read matters more than an optimistic one. The unbuilt phase means adjacent construction activity at some future point, and it means the open space promised in the plan arrives in stages. It also means the completed portion of the park sits at this building's door already, that residual development rights are concentrated to the north and west rather than on top of this parcel, and that the condominium's obligations to the site are contractual and knowable: the Park Restrictive Declaration recorded by Empire State Development binds every Pacific Park property, and the board sits as the building's member in the Pacific Park Owners Association that funds the open space's operation. These are documents a buyer can read, and should.
What remains is a well-built, well-serviced Prospect Heights condominium with a 24-hour lobby, real amenity depth, a LEED Silver envelope and an apartment mix running from studios to four-bedrooms — a short walk from the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Grand Army Plaza and the Vanderbilt Avenue restaurant corridor, with the Atlantic Terminal transit complex three blocks north.
Architecture and unit composition
The condominium occupies a single merged tax lot at the northwest corner of Vanderbilt Avenue and Dean Street, assembled from seven lots in Block 1129 plus a portion of the southerly half of Pacific Street between Carlton and Vanderbilt. The building rises 18 stories above one cellar level and totals roughly 360,400 gross square feet across 278 residences, three retail units and 102 storage bins.
Layouts run from studios through four-bedroom residences. Terraces appear on the setback lines and are recorded as limited common elements appurtenant to the units they serve, which puts them under a detailed schedule of house rules — no enclosures, no structures, no carpeting, nothing hung from the parapet, planting weight capped at 100 pounds, rust-proof furniture only. Interiors were delivered in a consistent palette of whites and grays with Carrara marble and warm woods, custom millwork, sustainably sourced kitchen cabinetry, and a washer and dryer in every apartment. The LEED Silver program behind the envelope is substantive: FSC-certified wood, low-VOC finishes, high-efficiency energy recovery ventilators, filtered fresh air to each residence, stormwater retention. One diligence item worth raising on a specific line is the plan's own disclosure that occupants of units near equipment floors may perceive noise or vibration during normal operation.
Building operations
550 Vanderbilt runs as a full-service condominium. The lobby is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week; a resident manager and porters handle the physical plant; three passenger elevators serve cellar through penthouse, with a fourth combination passenger/service car reserved for scheduled moves and deliveries and an additional service elevator between ground and cellar. The amenity plan is spread deliberately rather than stacked: fitness center with two studio spaces and the laundry room in the cellar; pet grooming station, lounge, conference area and library on the ground floor; the landscaped roof deck with gas grills on the 8th floor, open 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. under current rules. Storage bins are licensed rather than deeded, carry a $0.50 per square foot monthly fee, and were sold only to unit purchasers.
Governance is now resident-side. The twentieth amendment records that the Sponsor Control Period had ended, that the sponsor retained a single unsold residential unit, and that the seats attaching to the three sponsor-held retail units remained sponsor-designated — a structure worth understanding before you read a board minute. Management history and the current agent are maintained in The Roebling Research Library and confirmed with clients during diligence.
Recent sales
The retrade record
Lines that have traded more than once in the public record — the building’s appreciation arc, apartment by apartment.
Recent closings at this building, sourced from NYC Department of Finance records. Apartment-level detail (line, condition, asking-price context) verified upon consultation request.
| Date | Unit | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Jun 17, 2026 | 1108 | $2,589,000 |
| May 6, 2026 | 1416 | $735,000 |
| Apr 15, 2026 | 1308 | $2,450,000 |
| Feb 19, 2026 | 1203 | $1,560,000 |
| Jan 23, 2026 | 615 | $1,028,000 |
| Dec 26, 2025 | 1508 | $2,350,000 |
Full closing history with price-per-square-foot over time, the complete retrade record, and every line that has traded.
Sales sourced from NYC Department of Finance recorded transfers (BBL 3-01129-7501) and verified listing data. Apartment-level facts (line, condition, asking-price context) curated and cross-verified by The Roebling Team research desk. Not all transactions cross-verify with ACRIS records — sponsor and LLC purchases sometimes record at stipulated values rather than market price.
What to know if you’re buying
Underwrite the abatement, not the current tax line. The 15-year 421-a exemption declines on a schedule tied to HPD's certificate of eligibility. Build the fully assessed number into your model and treat today's bill as temporary.
Read the Pacific Park documents. The Park Restrictive Declaration, the Owners Association structure and the open-space obligations are recorded and knowable. So is the state of the unbuilt phase, the platform financing, and the new master developer's timeline. A buyer who understands all of it negotiates better than one who is surprised by it later.
Price the terrace and the exposure separately. Setback lines with usable outdoor space and park-facing exposures are a different asset from interior lines. Comparables must match on both.
The building is outside the historic district, and that matters both ways. No Landmarks review on your alteration; also no district protection against what gets built to the north and west. The governing framework here is Empire State Development's design guidelines.
Confirm the amenity roster as it stands today. The offering plan's schedule of services and facilities is the reliable baseline; the recorded rules carry some form language that does not match the building as built.
What to know if you’re selling
Lead with exclusivity of tenure. This is the only condominium at Pacific Park. A buyer who wants to own on this site owns here or nowhere, and that sentence belongs at the top of the marketing.
Sell the architecture on its own terms. Custom-fired brick, the 60-foot street wall and staged setbacks, day-lit elevator vestibules, LEED Silver, in-unit laundry throughout — this is a design-led building in a market where most new-development marketing defaults to amenity lists.
Be straight about Atlantic Yards. Buyers will find the coverage. Presenting the delivered park, the recorded obligations and the current development timeline plainly produces better outcomes than letting a buyer's attorney discover them in week three.
Anchor to matched, recent comparables. Same-line and same-exposure sales from 2025 forward, adjusted for remaining abatement, are the defensible anchors; older sales carry a materially different tax picture and will mislead.
Condominium mechanics are your timeline advantage. Right of first refusal, no board interview, 30-to-45-day closings — worth stating explicitly to buyers cross-shopping the neighborhood's prewar co-ops.
Comparable buildings
If you're considering 550 Vanderbilt Avenue, also evaluate:
- 1 Grand Army Plaza (Richard Meier on Prospect Park) — the neighborhood's other architect-signed condominium, at the park's gate
- 700 Pacific Street — newer Prospect Heights condominium on the same Pacific Street frontage
- 11 Hoyt Street — Boerum Hill's large amenity-led condominium; the closest full-service peer at scale
- 509 Pacific Street (The Hendrik) — boutique Boerum Hill condominium; the small-scale alternative
Considering a move at 550 Vanderbilt Avenue?
Request a private building brief with the relevant comparable sales, current and off-market availability, and an apartment-specific view of value.
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A Private Pricing Opinion — what your apartment at 550 Vanderbilt Avenue would likely sell for today, what it costs to sell, and what you’d walk away with — reviewed personally against condition, exposures, renovation quality, and the competition actually on the market.