The REAL DEAL Goodbye all-cash, hello financing Like neighbors, 14 West 14th Street condo is revived as market turns on busy thoroughfare You can file the bizarre sales situation at 14 West…... Read more >

The REAL DEAL
Goodbye all-cash, hello financing

Like neighbors, 14 West 14th Street condo is revived as market turns on busy thoroughfare

You can file the bizarre sales situation at 14 West 14th Street under "thanks to the economy."

Rather than sell all their units at post-meltdown discounts, the sponsors of the building decided to sell just one-third of the units. Read: Roughly 20 of the 30 condos will remain in the developer's hands and be rented out.

Because most banks won't finance buyers in a building where only 33 percent of the units are being sold, the developers, Albert and Robert Dweck, originally said they would sell only to all-cash buyers. Sales started in September.

"It's presented a unique financing situation," said Prudential Douglas Elliman executive vice president Rob Gross, who has been working on the project for two years.

That strategy, not surprisingly, didn't bear much fruit. No buyers plunked down cash for their apartments out of the gate. But then, after a couple of months, the team finally found a bank, NJ Lenders Corp., willing to finance buyers at the building.

"[NJ Lenders] specializes in working with developers and they saw this project in a different way," said Gross. "The owners are solvent; we don't have a construction loan but a line of credit from Bank of America. There is very little debt in [the developers'] lives, which is atypical for most developers in that they don't leverage or use other people's money."

This ability to get financing for buyers, Gross said, has raised interest markedly. In fact, in the past three months Gross has negotiated eight contracts, three of which happened to be all-cash.

"When I opened it up to financing and when the building was closer to being finished, the people started coming," said Gross. He needs 15 percent of the 30 units in contract in order to be declared effective by the attorney general.

"I'm extremely confident that we will have enough in contract by April," Gross said.

But there are other challenges facing 14 West 14th Street, where prices range from $520,000 up to $1.6 million, including whether potential buyers will be willing to live in a building filled with renters. (The rentals are not on the market yet.)

"People don't want to go into a building and pay $1 million and then have the rest of it rented. People are nervous about condos anyway -- 'zombie condos,'" said Joél Moss, associate broker at Warburg Realty, referring to buildings where a majority of the units have been bought by investors and thus remain half-empty.

"If they knew that that's what was happening [at 14 West 14th], it might make them think twice," she said. Moss has tried to show 14 West 14th to a couple of her clients, but so far no one has been interested, mostly because of the location on such a busy street.

Residential development on 14th Street as a whole has struggled since the market started its tumble. "Fourteenth Street definitely got stymied by the economy," said Darren Sukenik, managing director at Elliman.

It took three years and four exclusive sales teams -- Dwelling Quest, Brown Harris Stevens, Elliman, and R.P. Miller and Associates -- to sell out the Prime, a nine-unit condo on 14th Street between Eighth and Ninth avenues.

It wasn't until R.P. Miller took over in late 2008 that units started to move. Though prices were lowered by about 25 percent, Reba Miller, president of the firm, attributes the sales less to pricing and more to new flooring and a revamping of the marketing strategy. "I changed the light wood [flooring] to a very dark wood, almost black," said Miller. She also brought in all-new furniture and redesigned the Web site using new photographs of the units. "And then we adjusted pricing. I didn't think [pricing] was the key, though it helped."

She pointed out that the pricing, when it was originally set at around $1,600 a foot back in 2006, was actually in line with the market at the time. "We just adjusted it to the new market," she said of lowering the price per square foot to about $1,000. "This was not a moneymaker for the investors, but at least they didn't give it back to the bank."

Loft 14, another boutique project on 14th Street, this one between Sixth and Seventh avenues, has a similar story.

Elliman's Bracha Group took over sales there last April. At the time, the nine-unit project had been on the market for a couple of years and had sold exactly zero units. After lowering prices significantly, Bracha Group unloaded eight of the two-bedroom, two-bathroom condos in less than a year.

"[Lowering prices] was the first thing we did," said GieFaan Kim, an agent with the Bracha Group, which decreased the asking price per square foot from around $1,400 to around $1,100. "The model apartment [becoming] ready is another thing that helped the sales."

At 14 West 14th Street, the units have 10-foot-tall windows, Italian Aster Cucine cabinets and Bosch dishwashers in the kitchens; bathrooms have Thaso stone countertops and Hansgrohe rain showerheads.

"It shows really well," said Gross. "If it was built or designed as a rental, the finishes wouldn't be as pretty as they are. We wanted [the developers] to invest in real oak floors and HVAC and real stoves."

Studios from 525 square feet to two-bedrooms over 1,000 square feet all fall around $1,000 a foot, which is attractive to buyers and could draw them to a less-than-desirable 14th Street.

"I think 14th Street is a difficult sell. You don't have a lot of curb appeal. There are still several dollar stores," said Warburg's Moss. "But $1,000 a foot is what people have been waiting for since the crash."

 

 

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Williamsburg housing market springs to life Falling prices and special offers, such as one year of free mortgage payments, are drawing budding crowds in the glutted Brooklyn neighborhood this summer.…... Read more >

Williamsburg housing market springs to life

Falling prices and special offers, such as one year of free mortgage payments, are drawing budding crowds in the glutted Brooklyn neighborhood this summer.

Woebegone Williamsburg, ground zero for residential overbuilding in recent years, is beginning to draw a modest crowd.

Toll Brothers said that the sales office at One Northside Piers, its 29-story luxury condominium development on the waterfront, has drawn 60 people this month. The boost in traffic was due to the big developer’s summer “live free for one year” promotional program and an increase in buyer confidence, reckons Scott Avram, a senior project manager at the company. Under the promotion, which was announced in early July, Toll Brothers offers to cover buyers’ mortgage payments, real estate taxes and common charges for one year. The promotion ends Aug. 31.

“We are making it easier for buyers,” said Mr. Avram, who noted that in the past three weeks, seven people have signed contracts to take advantage of the program. “The uptick in traffic can’t all be attributed to the program, but it certainly helped.”

Nearby, at 320 Bedford Ave., there are other surprising stirrings. A new apartment building with 14 loftlike apartments was leased up in just one day, on July 19, according to brokerage Aptsandlofts.com, which marketed the new building. Rents range from $1,800 to $3,300 a month for studios and one- and two-bedroom units.

“I have never witnessed an entire building leased in one day, not even at the height of the market,” said Alex Saltalamacchia, Aptsandlofts.com’s director of leasing.

He noted that the apartments' rents reflected the current economic conditions right from the start, and that helped move the units quickly.

“Renters certainly are renting as long as a decent product is offered at a decent price,” Mr. Saltalamacchia added.

At One Northside Piers, one key selling point is that the tower is one of the few in Williamsburg that is 75% sold-out. Of course, what also helped was Toll Brothers decision earlier this year to slash prices by as much as 37% and to offer perks such as free mortgage insurance.

There is activity in the neighborhood because “buyers can negotiate,” said Joél Moss, a Warburg Realty Partnership broker. “You can get good deals.”

Ms. Moss has two sales contracts signed for two-bedroom units at One Northside Piers and 50 Bayard, because the buyers were able to bargain prices down by 20% to 25% from their peaks.

 

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Curbed PriceSpotter: Heights House With Room for a Friend Wednesday, June 17, 2009, by Joey PriceSpotter is Curbed's asking price guessing game. We provide you with some details and pictures from an apartment…... Read more >

Curbed PriceSpotter: Heights House With Room for a Friend
Wednesday, June 17, 2009, by Joey

PriceSpotter is Curbed's asking price guessing game. We provide you with some details and pictures from an apartment listing, and you take a crack at the price in the comments. Tomorrow we reveal the answer.

And hey, no cheating!

What/Where: Five-floor, two-family townhouse on State Street
Square Feet: 6,000
Taxes: $23,381 (annual)
The Skinny: If a guy would impersonate his dead mother to have a crack at a Park Slope townhouse, imagine what he'd do to get his hands on this pretty 23-footer in the Brooklyn Heights Historic District. The two-family house is currently configured as a 4BR owners' spread (with wet bar and sun deck) and a 2BR rental apartment on the garden level. It was built at the turn of the century, but the recent renovation makes it a bit tough to carbon date. So, how much?

 
PriceSpotter Reveal: Heights House
With Room for a Friend
Thursday, June 18, 2009, by Joey

And now, the results of yesterday's PriceSpotter asking price guessing game...
Location: 85 State Street
Asking: $4,200,000
The guesses were a bit all over the place on this two-family townhouse in Brooklyn Heights, which, if we were offering our two cents, we might call "tasty." But that's fine, because the sellers seem to be a bit unsure themselves. The house was previously listed at $5.95 million. The asking price was not pinned down by any PriceSpotters, though there was a guess of $4.25 million. Better luck next week!
· Listing: 85 State Street [Warburg]

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Broker’s Weekly Favorite Things: The Green Dream For Joél Moss, associate broker at Warburg Realty Partnership, less is more. She uses her own cloth bag instead of plastic, she now uses coffee mugs…... Read more >

Broker’s Weekly
Favorite Things: The Green Dream

For Joél Moss, associate broker at Warburg Realty Partnership, less is more. She uses her own cloth bag instead of plastic, she now uses coffee mugs instead of throw-away cups and cooks at home more to avoid the excessive packaging that come with take-out food. Moss said, “doing my part to protect the environment is always on my mind … all the little things we do add up and it does make a difference.”

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