Case study · 421-a (one of the final projects under the original program) · Lonicera Partners · 2022–2024
The project
Hanover House is a 463-foot residential tower at 17 Hanover Place in Downtown Brooklyn, designed by Fogarty Finger and developed by Lonicera Partners. The 34-story structure spans 295,000 square feet and delivers 314 rental apartments in one- and two-bedroom configurations, with 95 units reserved as affordable. The ground floor carries 9,000 square feet of retail.
Hanover House is explicitly one of the final projects built under the original 421-a program, which expired the month before construction milestones locked. The project’s affordable component targets 130% AMI.
The challenge
Lonicera Partners is a sophisticated operator, well-versed in New York’s housing lottery process — but had previously experienced delays in finalizing full lease-up on a prior lottery. The objective at Hanover House was to expedite the lease-up process itself, to meet client needs without the schedule slippage common in larger 130% AMI deliveries.
The execution
Regtime enhanced its operations specifically to increase rapid lease-up capacity for Hanover House. The approach emphasized:
- Streamlined document submission processing sized for higher volume.
- Expedited tours and lease signing, with specialists focused on the specific stage each applicant was working through.
- Continuous process refinement throughout the lease-up, allowing the team to compress review time as applicants moved through the funnel.
The result was a measurable acceleration of application reviews and lease signings relative to comparable 130% AMI projects.
The outcomes
- 19,100 applications received via Housing Connect.
- 3,200 applications processed.
- 54 leases signed of 95 affordable units (active lease-up at the time of measurement).
- 4 lead-to-lease conversions within the 130% AMI sector at the measurement point.
- New benchmark established for expedited 130% AMI lease-up velocity.
What this project established
Expedited lease-up is an operational discipline, not a marketing claim. Hanover House showed that explicitly structuring the team by funnel stage — rather than by function or geography — compresses the application-to-lease cycle. For sophisticated owners who have lived through the delays of prior lotteries, this is the differentiator worth paying for.
