Less than a year ago it was a retail building. Soon it will be a 30-story tower with 158 apartments.

Gold Stone Management and FBL Development have secured a $103.6 million construction loan from Ponce Bank for 245 Duffield Street. The site sits near the corner of Duffield and Fulton Streets in Downtown Brooklyn.

What's going up

Designed by INOA Architecture, the tower will rise about 450 feet. It will hold 158 apartments averaging 602 SF, along with 4,600 SF of ground-floor retail. The building sits on a multistory podium and a wedge shaped crown tops an open air roof deck.

The numbers

Gold Stone paid $31 million for the roughly 8,330 SF lot in October 2025. The site allows about 83,300 buildable SF, roughly ten times the size of the lot. That density is what makes a tower this tall possible on a lot this small. Getting from purchase to a nine-figure construction loan took the developers less than a year.

A lender that keeps coming back

Ponce Bank has worked with FBL before. Over the past year, it has financed several of FBL's ground up projects across Brooklyn and Queens. Lending to the same developer again and again shows confidence in both the sponsor and the neighborhood.

Why this matters for commercial real estate

Construction financing has been hard to secure across much of New York City. A loan of more than $100 million for a 158-unit tower shows that lenders are still willing to back well located, ground up projects. That kind of capital shapes land values, development pipelines and investor appetite well beyond a single block.

The deal also sets a new benchmark. Owners and buyers of nearby development sites will likely see their properties valued against this one. That affects pricing, negotiations and decisions about whether to hold or sell.

Why this matters to us at Tri State Commercial

We work every day with retail tenants, restaurant operators and property owners across the tri-state area. For us, the 4,600 SF of new retail at the base of this tower is the detail to watch. Adding 158 households on the Fulton Street corridor means more people walking by, shopping and eating nearby. That makes storefronts in the area more appealing to tenants and more valuable to landlords.

Projects like this change what a neighborhood's retail market looks like. We'll be watching how it shapes leasing demand and rents along Fulton Street as the tower moves toward completion.

If you own, lease or are thinking about investing near Downtown Brooklyn, we'd be glad to talk through what this means for you.

Source: PincusCo, "FBL, Gold Stone affiliate signs $103.6M construction loan with Ponce for 158-unit project in Downtown Brooklyn," September 29, 2026.