OPEN HOUSE at 444 Central Park West #12B

Can you explain the $2.3MM price tag for five rooms on 104th Street? Is there a recent sale in the neighborhood that even approaches that?

$2.3??? Seriously?? Either your clients are nuts or you are. It'll never move without a significant price cut.

i guess this is the last we'll hear from the lovely rebecca.

Not the last from me, I'm sorry - please come take a look at our Open House so you can appreciate the apartment! The apartment is right on the Park with SPECTACULAR views, plus it is a triple mint renovation. Check out 455 CPW if you want to see higher prices at 105th Street!

"Triple mint" means absolutely nothing: it is gibberish. I second West81st - are there any recent comps in the neighborhood that even come near this price?

$2.3. . .forget it. And forget 455 CPW also. People need to be reminded what year this is.

RebeccaSherman: Welcome to Streeteasy. Depending on your point of view, this board is either a forum for data-savvy buyers and market watchers, or a self-reinforcing support group for bitter renters. Maybe it's both. Anyway, I discourage you from touting a listing here unless you can defend your price with solid comps, or at least a reasonable explanation.

We've all heard the "It's a very special apartment and we are confident we have priced it right" line about every overpriced apartment that has come and gone during the market correction. Around here, you need to do better than that.

West81, out of curiosity, do you have any insight into what "triple mint" is supposed to mean? I see it all the time, and all I can tell is that it means it has been renovated in the recent past. Are there three specific things that go into this designation? I mean, a recent renovation isn't always a plus.

My own presumption is that they spent a lot of money on it, probably for their own use. Problem with this is that the more you spent on yourself the less likely you are to have made something worth the cost to a buyer, and the farther you went in some style direction, the more likely you are to have left someone else's taste in the dust.

evnyc: I think you're right - it's gibberish, not a term of art. The three things I would expect are...
1) Full reno, not piecemeal (but not necessarily gut);
2) Very recent work - three years old max;
3) High-end finishes.
In practice, you're lucky to get two out of three.

In other words, few other than yourself will see the value of the renovation.

Westie - you forgot taste. Someone can have all three, but it is all French Provicial or some idea ofr venetian palatial, or even Phillipe Stark, lots probably won't like it.

Thanks - now I know I'm not saying something totally boneheaded. I think it's fairly common for potential buyers to hate a renovation even with high-end finishes and recent work. I'm not especially picky, and even I've seen renos that make me cringe.

ah rebecca: check out what happened to agent rachel here wheen she used caps and ridiculous adjectives. why would anyone pay anything close to this at 105th st? Give us something real or do yourself the favor of moving on.

I think they're pinning their comp on PH-D sale, which did look "triple mint" and more ahem, neutral, than this apt. 18D (larger square LR) was also priced fairly high with condition issues, but views were very good and a small outdoor space. I visited this bldg 4 years ago, and the common areas were VERY run down.

Ah, and BTW, PH-D had fabulous outdoor space.

and it seems to have sold pretty nice at the top of the boom.

High maintenance as well.

way to go west81st...she never came back.

I spent a little time going over the floorplans for this building. There are some nice lines. I particularly like the A-line, classic 6, SW corner. Unusually for classic 6es, this has 3 bedrooms & no maid's. Exceptionally large LR. There's a 1br with LR & BR & kitchen & bathroom with all rooms facing the park. Perfect pied-a-terre or retired person abode. The real pitfall of this bldg are the common areas & elevator. Kinda gross & smelly.

A-line is SE corner of building, NW corner of block.

the photos are horrenda and do nothing to sell the triply minty-ness of this unit. what's with the doll beds in the 2nd bedroom? kitchen fine, but the pulls? Not Tm

I think "triple mint" does indeed convey something somewhat specific, mostly about condition and somewhat about luxury. (At least one of the large brokers puts the condition of apartments in their computer system as Good, Excellent, Mint ...)

I would expect on a $2M listing for it to mean Central Air Conditioning, preferably with zoned controls, a fairly new chef's kitchen (I'd say no more than two years old rather than three) with high-end appliances and something whiz-bang (like an extra oven or a Miele espresso machine) and new windows, as well as a degree of pristineness (I know, not a word) throughout.

By that definition, I'm not sure this place makes it. There are so many built-ins that it's actually tough to tell the state of the walls, but the DR floor ... I'm not sure that has been done in the past couple of years.

I LOVE the moldings though.

ali r.
{downtown broker}

hey, its got its pluses...the issue is location and price. at $1.2-$1.5 million, a different story altogether.

Ali: OK, so some clever Winform developer stuck a dropdown control on the input screen for new listings. That doesn't mean the available values for "Condition" are clearly defined, or that the agents understand them, or that the firm enforces consistency.

Michael W.
{uptown snark and skeptical licensee}

I have to disagree with my colleague that triple mint has to include central AC in a prewar unit with normal ceiling height.

If two senior brokers from the same firm can't agree on something as basic as the climate control part of "triple mint", I think that answers evnyc's question.

Am I the only one who is looking at the floorplan and finding the room dimensions to be impossible? (look at LR and MBR right next to it). Without seeing the unit, my guess would be the room dimensions may be correct, but the changes made to the original layout are not properly reflected in the fp?

Whenever you have a market contraction, you always see SOME areas where "stuff" was beyond some long standing border, that in the most recent boom people ignored the long standing border. It will be interesting to see what happens this time with CPW and 96th Street, because last time around prices for those buildings suffered significantly more than the market as a whole. Same thing happened in the East Village, "Chelsea" North of 23rd Street, and a whole bunch of other places.

West81: I have this expression for RE ads in Manhattan: "Adjectives are free".

Also, if you think "triple mint" is tough, try SOTA.

30yrs, I wondered the same thing about about the floorplan. I figured the LR dimensions included the depth of the gallery (not an honest move) and the BR depth only went as far as the closet doors. Of course, they could always just be making things up.

Your point about borders is an interesting one, as I could easily see it applying to Alphabet City. Certainly there's no more appetite for boutique condos over there. Co-ops have dropped, and I wonder if it will be a real wipeout.

30yrs, right, they hired some slob to redraw the floorplan. It should be labelled "NOT TO SCALE" in crayon. Don't know why they didn't just edit the original plans, which're out there. I have them for the upper setback floors, for some reason. Some good layouts.

Re: this place, they need to get rid of the owners' crap and repaint. Fine to live in but not to sell.

What NWT said. I have the original floorplans, from 2nd - 16th floor. When I zoom in to look at room dimensions, the numbers are fuzzy but they do resemble the ones given by the floorplan. When the realtor redrew the floorplan, the master bedroom & master bathroom are skinnier than they are IRL.

I have the original fp for the unit. It shows the lr as correct, but a 22' long mbr next to it. It also shows a DR of 20' x 12'6" as opposed to 14'7" x 12'4". now the gallery relative to the front door can't really have changed (what I mean is that the "center line" - drawing a straight line from the middle of thr front door straight to the far opposing wall is constant because you can't move the front door due to it's placement in the common hallways) so there appears to be a bunch more going on in terms of reworking of the original fp than is indicated by the fp shown as being current".

Did anyone see the unit and can comment on this?

"Your point about borders is an interesting one, as I could easily see it applying to Alphabet City. Certainly there's no more appetite for boutique condos over there. Co-ops have dropped, and I wonder if it will be a real wipeout."

I'll have to go searching for the notes I took, but when there was a period where there were several big public auctions (similar to the one held the other week with the sale of the Newark house for ?$12k?) back in the 90's, there were a number of units as large or larger than this one in the prewar CPW buildings which went for VERY low $ (memory says under $100K).

sota?

Ali, 30years, and West81st - this is a really interesting discussion. REO, what's SOTA?

Hey West 81, I applaud your outspokenness and perspective. I am not as attentive as you - you are doing a lot of work for SE readers.

"State-of-the-art"

LookingAround: Thanks. Happy to share.

Julia: I didn't mean to run Rebecca off the board. I really would like to know the basis for her pricing of this apartment. I happen to like the listing. I'd even stipulate the SPECTACULAR-ness of the views and the triple-mintiness of the renovation, though the latter is highly debatable. My only question is where she came up with that $2.3MM number: Prior sales? Competitive positioning? The deep recesses of her small intestine?

I have posed this question to a lot of brokers recently, and consistently get some variation of the following two answers:
1) "It's a very special apartment and we are confident we have priced it right."
2) "Well, make an offer. You never know."

#1 is the usual response when the listing is fresh, or the price has just been reduced from an even more aspirational level. #2 is more common for stale listings that are anchored to a delusional price. The following translations usually fit pretty well:
1) "We told the seller how special her apartment is when we pitched her. Now we have to wait a while before confronting her with reality."
2) "We told the seller how special her apartment is when we pitched her. Now I need you to do my job for me, because I'm too timid and ineffective to confront her with reality."

Are brokers telling people to factor in having to give a 15-30% discount off of asking price?

I wonder if that is partly to blame for this and other over priced properties.

West81st, hilarious and true. I suspect that the small intestines are all too frequently setting the ask in this market.

Thai, I believe there's a fair amount of that going on. Unfortunately it isn't working in most cases - if it was, we wouldn't have several distinct threads along the lines of "chasing the market down" and "if you can demonstrate market movement with comps."

SOTA - thanks, REO.

455 CPW is a condo to begin with. The building was gut renovated. No comparison to your co-op. I'm not so sure the prices in this market are that high at 455.

Sherman's March to the (reduced) Fee.

streetsmart: 455 CPW (the tower) was built, not gut renovated. Built from the ground up. Do you homework.

Is that really mirror as a backsplash in the kitchen?

inquier part of 455 CPW was gut renovated and part was built from the ground up.

what difference does that make?

West81st, great comment but I think you were incorrect using the small intestines, it should be the large intestines/colon.

csn: There are two different pricing methods associated with that region of human anatomy.

Small intestine = "Pricing from the gut", i.e. based on instinct rather than comps.

Large intestine = Pulling the price out of one's @$$.

The two methods are closely related, and tend to overlap.