Former North Fork Bank headquarters sold

The former Capital One bank operations center on Main Road has been sold.

But the buyer has not yet been publicly identified, the property’s real estate broker confirmed Wednesday.

The roughly 8-acre property at 9025 Main Road in Mattituck was sold after an online auction ended last Wednesday, said Samuel Clark of the Manhattan firm Cushman and Wakefield.

Mr. Clark — who has represented the property for the past seven months — said he couldn’t discuss the sales price or the buyer of the property since the transaction has not yet closed.

“Everything’s been signed; we just need to go through the closing process,” Mr. Clark said. “We need to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.”

According to a representative from Auction.com, which handled the auction, the property’s starting bid was set at $600,000 but did not meet its reserve to sell during the auction. The property was sold in a “re-capture,” a transaction offer that occurred outside of the auction itself, the representative said.

Southold Town Supervisor Scott Russell said Wednesday he hadn’t heard the property sold, but said the town doesn’t want to see the property used as retail space.

“We want to make sure it remains an office space,” Mr. Russell said. “The difficulty of it is that it’s pretty large for Southold Town.”

The building originally housed a supermarket after it was bought in a foreclosure by Alan Cardinale in November 1982 for $175,000, said town assessor Kevin Webster.

Two years later, Mr. Cardinale sold the property to North Fork Bancorp for $975,000, according to town property records. The building served as the headquarters for North Fork Bank, which expanded and renovated the building in 1999 and 2003.

In 2006, Capital One acquired North Fork Bank for $13.2 billion and repurposed the 73,000-square-foot building as a Capital One call center.

At the time of the Capital One takeover, then-North Fork Bank president John Kanas said none of the bank’s 350 Mattituck employees would lose their jobs, according to previous news reports.

But in August 2011, Capital One Bank chose to consolidate a majority of its back-office work in Mattituck to Richmond, Va., and Melville. The call center was closed and about 135 people were fired that year, with roughly 65 more employees laid off in 2012.

The building was put on the market in 2013.

The listing came as Capital One sought to unload properties in other markets, such as the half-million square feet of office space for sale in a Chicago office complex, according to a news story in Crain’s Chicago Business, an industry newspaper. That deal was also handled by Cushman and Wakefield.

Tax assessor records show the property has a full market value of $10,683,000 with an assessed value of $124,995.

At the time of the initial listing in 2013, Southold Town administrators said they were working with Suffolk County to find the “right fit” for the property, one that would reflect the area and support the local job market.

On Wednesday, Mr. Russell said Mr. Cardinale had acquired an easement on the property when he sold it to North Fork Bank that restricts the property’s owner from using the space for anything other than office space.

Only Mr. Cardinale could retire that easement if he repurchased the property, Mr. Russell said. In that instance, the property would only require site plan approval from the town to house retail space again.

Mr. Cardinale could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday afternoon.

Local real estate agency manager and North Fork Promotion Council president Joan Bischoff van Heemskerck called the office building a “large and unusual space” for the area, which makes it difficult to predict what the new owners may use it for.

“I’m not sure you can keep that building,” he said. “If you could do something that would benefit the community and create some jobs that’d be great, but I don’t know. At this point we’ll have to see who bought it and what they want to do with it.”