Church buys GEICO Woodbury property for $27M

After a previous sale fell through, GEICO has sold its sprawling Woodbury property for $27 million. 

The buyer for the 236,365-square-foot office building on 20 acres at 750 Woodbury Road is the Christian Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses. 

It is unclear what the religious organization has planned for the property and church officials were unable to be reached for comment. 

In 2021, GEICO was in contract to sell its Woodbury property to a New Jersey-based developer, but the deal fell through when it became apparent that Town of Oyster Bay wouldn’t allow a redevelopment of the site into a warehousing and distribution complex. Real estate sources say GEICO would have realized close to $48 million if that first sale would have come to fruition. 

The Tilles family sold the Woodbury land to GEICO some 50 years ago, and the four-story, red brick and glass building served as an anchor for the family’s development of the Woodbury office park since it opened in Oct. 1973, Peter Tilles told LIBN in 2021. 

Meanwhile, GEICO signed a lease for 200,000 square feet of office space at 1 Huntington Quadrangle in Melville, where it had announced to employees in Nov. 2021 that the company would eventually relocate to. The Chevy Chase, Md.-based company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, had planned to move into its new digs in the fourth quarter of this year, once renovations on the Melville offices are completed. 

However, since then, real estate sources say GEICO has been trying to sublease the Melville space. Officials at GEICO could not be reached for comment. 

While GEICO settled for a smaller payday in the sale of its property, the biggest loser in the Woodbury transaction is likely the Town of Oyster Bay, since as a religious organization, the new owner of the property would be tax exempt. As of 2021, the annual property taxes on the former GEICO property was about $1.227 million. 

The Woodbury sale, which closed on the last week of December, was brokered by Daniel Abbondandolo, Joegy Raju, David Bernhaut, Gary Gabriel and Ryan Larkin of Cushman & Wakefield.