Former Cop Worth $400M After Brooklyn Real Estate Investments

RED HOOK, BROOKLYN — Perhaps nothing reveals how much the borough has changed the last five decades than the story of former NYPD detective Greg O'Connell, who bought his first Brooklyn property for $22,000 and is now worth $400 million in real estate investments.

The 77-year-old bought that first property, found in Cobble Hill, when he moved to Brooklyn in 1967. Since then, he has bought up about 1.3 million square feet of buildings, mainly in Red Hook, that have gone up in value so much over the years that he is now worth about $400 million, according to a Bloomberg profile.

O'Connell told the outlet that the first started investing in property back when the waterfront neighborhood was essentially a ghost town.

“You could drive down Van Brunt Street on a Sunday on a bike with no clothes on and it wouldn’t make any difference,” he said. "Nobody wanted (the properties)."

His own townhouse was only $4,000 when he bought it in 1976 is now worth more than $1.2 million. O'Connell also owns about 385,000 square feet of undeveloped land in the area.

Several abandoned warehouses he bought in 1992 from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for $450,000 are now worth more than $170 million, Bloomberg reported.

His investment story shows how Red Hook and other nearby areas in Brooklyn have changed from affordable alternatives to Manhattan to their own gentrified hot-spots.

O'Connell said he worries that the increasing land values could threaten the types of tenants he has tried to bring to his buildings.

Red Hook was recently named an opportunity zone as part of the 2017 federal tax overhaul, , Bloomberg reported.

The 77-year-old said his goals for buying the properties were to maintain the neighborhood's historical significance, attract small businesses and create jobs for local residents. Many of his properties are rented out to local nonprofit organizations.

“Most people haven’t learned that not everything is dollars and cents,” he said. “I’m hoping that my children understand that, and I think they do.”

Read more about O'Connell's story here.