An overpriced listing?

listing price is irrelevant. If you want the apt, show them your best bid. If they choose not to sell it, then so be it. Let them suck canal water.

I think a listing price is relevant when it comes to targeting the right group of people, but ultimately patient is right. It isn't what you are asking, but what you are willing to take.

I have seen listings asking $6m get overbid by $500k and I have seen listings asking $800k that end up selling close to $600k. It all depends...

(Matthew Russell - Brown Harris Stevens)

It all about the comps, not how much someone spent on a reno. Be careful if this is a flip, your 150k reno may in fact have cost 50k.

Me personally - being an owner myself - and one who has put much blood sweat tears and hard earned money into upgrading/renovating - if I were selling an apt that I had gut renovated w/ $150K of renovations, flip or not, I would not think I was "asking too much." Even in this market. If the renos only cost like $50K, then yeah like others said, too much. But if that amount was really spent on reno, diff story.

As a recent buyer the cost of reno is completely dependent on the situation for me. If the apartment was last bought in "estate condition" and was renovated to bring it up to date with mid-high end finishings I wouldn't mind the upcharge at all (caveat being that it was within my taste). It would save me the hassle of the project.

However, if the flipper did super-high finishings and made choices to spend money where I wouldn't have spent money, then I wouldn't be willing to pay up as much as they put in. We looked at one such apartment, and one of the big sales pitch for the extra $ was how the owner had ripped out every existing pipe in the apartment and replaced it with wider ones so there would be "amazing" water pressure. I said, hey that's great, but I'M not paying for that!

150k of reno can buy you very different things. If you did not pay attention to detail, that 150k of work may look terrible on the close-up. Not to mention the gotchas that lie underneath. I've only been in one or two properties where I felt that the job was so well-done that it would be worth the premium in price. In those cases, the seller didn't do it to flip, had proper construction management and was never ever going to get their $ back from the reno.

Good feedback all, some very good advice--thanks. I kind of feel like at the end of the day, if the apt is something I love and I compare it to whats out there and I think the price is OK, does it really matter what it was before? A gut renovation is a HUGE undertaking and if its all been done to my liking--why not

Oh and these pipes were all replaced too but not with bigger ones, just regular pipes cause the old ones were not looking so good after 75 years or so

Your comment brought to mind one of the first apartments that I saw. The owners had paid around $1.4m for the 2 bedroom condo in 2005 or 2006 and first listed the apartment for around $1.9m (it's been reduced a few times). The husband was in the design business and, to my inexperienced eye, the finishes all looked very high-end. I was also thinking that if I could buy the apartment at the right price, it was move-in ready and that I would never be able to do such a good renovation job myself. I had seen an identical unit in its original state as well. Fortunately, I asked my brother to look at the apartment and having owned several houses already, he pointed out all the ways the owners had cut costs. It taught me that unless you really know about renovations, it's difficult to gauge what the true costs were. I agree that I wouldn't pay extra for super high end finishes that I would have not done myself. But I have seen several units where the owners priced them several hundred thousand dollars above what they paid due to their valuation of what their extensive renovations are worth.