The owner of The Blue Moon Hotel, a 22-key boutique spot located on 100 Orchard Street, has dropped the asking price from nearly $30 million to $19.5 million, The Commercial Observer has learned.

Owner Robert Settenbrino spent five years restoring the Blue Moon Hotel’s classic touches, such as cast-iron stoves from the 19th century and advertisements from the 1920s. After the hotel was on the market for a year, Mr. Settenbrino has tapped an Eastern Consolidated team of Adelaide Polsinelli and Scott Ellard to handle the hotel’s sale.

“The asking price has been reduced, the market has gotten better, and the Eastern Consolidated platform is much more suitable for this type of sale,” said Ms. Polsinelli, who previously handled this listing when she was a broker at Marcus & Millichap.

A variety of "institutional users” have looked at the property, said Ms. Polsinelli, along with different types of firms in the hospitality and entertainment industries.

Ms. Polsinelli believes the best use for the hotel would be a transformation into a lounge or bar.

“As a hotel it really needs to go to the next step,” she said. “The lounge [of the hotel], that should be income-producing. It should be a restaurant, a bar, an area that makes money rather than be an amenity,” she added.

Mr. Settenbrino did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

The hotel features rooms with high ceilings, sizes that range from 320 to 750 square feet, and feature Juliet balconies that overlook the Lower East Side.

The hotel also offers the possibility to transform its roof into a rooftop bar.

“The hotel was built with loving care, but today the market for the hospitality industry has changed. It is not about a pretty, big room,” said Ms. Polsinelli, “it’s about how much fun can I have in this building and how many options do I have?”

Daniel Edward Rosen is reachable at Drosen@observer.com

The loan to a troubled Staten Island residential condo building built by the distressed developer Lieb Puretz was sold for nearly half its value, sources revealed to The Commercial Observer.

The investment group, Madison Realty Capital, scooped up the nearly $15 million in debt against 224 Richmond Terrace from lender Bank of New York for roughly $8.4 million.

An investment sales team from the real estate brokerage company Massey Knakal, led by the company’s chairman Robert Knakal, handled the sale of the 40-unit building’s mortgage. According to marketing materials released by the company to prospective buyers, the nearly 60,000-square-foot property, which was built in recent years, still needs interior work, including the installation of appliances.

By buying the debt, Madison Realty Capital can foreclose on the property, finish the remaining construction and either sell or rent out the units. An executive at Madison, Josh Zegen, who was involved in the acquisition couldn’t be reached for comment by press time.

224 Richmond Terrace is one among a number of real estate development projects in Staten Island that Mr. Puretz began during boom times and eventually defaulted on when the recession set in and crushed the economic projections underpinning their viability.

Among the broken deals was Waterfront Commons, a nearly 400,000-square-foot-mall that Mr. Puretz was planning. He also fell into foreclosure on a 57-unit condo at 155 Bay Street Landing and a 101-unit conversion project at 130 Bay Street Landing. The notes to those two buildings were also sold by Mr. Knakal. The two loans traded together last year for about $23 million, less than half their $54 million face value, to a company called Meadow Partners.

In 2011, Mr. Puretz was forced to declare bankruptcy.

Observers of Mr. Puretz’s spectacular fall from Staten Island’s biggest developer to one of the borough’s most glaring victims of the bust have hoped that pushing his projects into different hands will restart development in the area.

Daniel Geiger is reachable at Dgeiger@observer.com