The family behind real estate investment and management company JJ Operating Inc. sold a home in Midwood, Brooklyn, for a whopping $13.6 million.
Samuel and Isaac Jemal sold a property at 1151 East Seventh Street to a buyer whose identity is shielded by a shell company, 18 Midwood Owner LLC, according to public records. The deal was more than four times the amount the Jemals paid for the home when they bought it for $3 million in 2016.
The deal appears to have been off-market, and few details about the property are publicly available. Listing descriptions on Zillow and Realtor.com peg the home at roughly 4,600 square feet. Photos alongside the entries show a home under construction, which is marked as completed in 2021.
The property’s sale price is significantly higher than the priciest listings in the neighborhood, which include a seven-bedroom duplex on the same street asking just under $6 million and a new development home on East 8th Street asking $4.5 million.
However, the deal does align with other high-profile trades among real estate families in the neighborhood. Maguire Capital Group’s Marvin Azrak and his wife, Barbara Azrak, sold their home at 935 East Ninth Street for $9.5 million in 2024. A year later, Helm Equities developer Ayal Horovitz and his wife, Michele Bailey-Horovitz, sold their home on Avenue J for $15.5 million, Crain’s New York reported.
The Azraks’ and Horovitzs’ sales show how much prices have grown for homes in the area. When another well-known real estate name, Stanley Cayre, whose brother Joseph Cayre founded Midtown Equities, sold his home in 2017, he did so for just $3.6 million.
Prices in Midwood haven’t yet caught up to the upper echelons of sales in nearby Gravesend, which in November logged a $32 million deal after Eli Gindi sold his home on East Fourth Street to Victor Hakim of Choice Home Warranty.
The Jemal family’s JJ Operating owns commercial properties across New York and New Jersey, including a retail building on Grand Concourse in the Bronx, which they bought from Vornado Realty Trust in 2001 and refinanced with $52 million from Bank of America in 2017.
The company was also one of the developers behind a mixed-use development project at 278 Eighth Avenue in Chelsea, which completed construction in 2024. JJ Operating bought the site for $107 million in 2017.
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