An unsophisticated update

Then let me post this now before the vitriol comes. You did what you needed to do and it is paying off. Stay there and you will watch your unit go higher. I don't know of anyone else who bought in the last couple of years and has monthly of $1,800 per month. This is the way it should be. Cheers!

You clearly did the right thing for you. Since you invested in furniture and you are happy and rents are up right now, it would seem crazy to sell to take a profit. You are on a lower floor, you would have transaction costs etc. But I would watch the mortgage rates. We are about to go into a real inflationary period and the value of your dollars paid in a monthly mortgage will hold their value. If mortgage rates are lower now than when you financed, you might consider refinancing and taking a little extra equity out and invest it if you can be very conservative -- a little gold, a few US large cap dividend stocks, a single, strong tax free muni etc. That might hedge your apt appreciation if prices deteriorate if there is a double dip. Congratulations. You were not excessive like some who earn the vitriol on this board. You made a considered, conservative investment and your risk has paid off.

I agree with apt23. Transactions costs can eat up profit, but with inflation uptick highly likely by mid-decade this could turn into a great inflation hedge, should you decide to rent it out, Plus you have a fixed mortgage.

Home is home...congratualtions on being happy. After being a renter, a seller, a landlord, and back to my beloved NYC apartment which we rented out b/c of other circumstances but did hold off on huge renovations before the recession...I couldn't be happier. So we don't have a view of the park but we have three fireplaces are close to both C.P. and Reebok which we use all the time. I had an amazing rental where we went it just never felt like this. We bought back in early 2000 and are almost completely paid off. Cheaper than the suburbs including private school, gym memberships, etc. I think whatever works for each individual or family is what's best. Owning a home in Manhattan is what's best for us right now. I congratulate you on being happy. We sure are too and are thrilled our apartment didn't sell. We got low balled a lot but, not needing to sell helped..or was basically everything! What we needed was a home and we just figured out the sky fell a little bit for us but not completely. Too easy to be negative..we made the best of what we could and are happy to be home now too. I never felt that way in a rental. Congratulations again.

Good on ya booya

First, congrats on making $100,000 for doing absolutely nothing except paying $1800/mo. to "rent" an apt in Soho. Way to show how it's done. You'll get no negative responses on this thread, b/c there's nothing to say. The insane can't refute cold hard evidence of success. No one ever got rich from paying their landlord's mortgage.

More importantly, congrats on actually being a a true NYC resident, enjoying the psychological benefits of ownership, and making the place your own.

Best of all, you are wise to see how you could have over-analyzed this to death, and screwed yourself out of the deal entirely. You'd be renting for $2200, and no free $100k in cash. Yes, nothing to show for your time except bitterness, insanity, and a useless Excel sheet you keep editing like a mental patient.

The only regrettable part is all the years you wasted renting prior to 2008. Imagine you bought before 2008? You'd be sitting on twice the mountain of profits.

Owning: Cheaper than renting, and you get a free $100,000 for showing up. You gotta love this country!

OK...a free $100K? Really?

Big points to the OP for realizing that s/he loves the place, and can call it "home". Personally, I think this sings a way louder tune than a month-by-month calculation of a supposed theoretical profit.

A home is your HOME. All the slide rules and calculations will never translate to the ultimate profit: A HOME THAT YOU LOVE.

I'm just sayin'......

I wonder what the seller did with the money.

What about others who didn't buy in 2009? Was your cash in the bank earning 1% or in the stock market?

OP, when i invest my money by reading prospectus from different fund managers et staff, RARELY do i go with the guy who "knows it all," (read is more interested in his 1% fee)...

..90% of the time i go with the guy who implicitly says 'he doesn't know what will happen in the future'...

..most of the time "sophisticated" experts don't know jack (oh haii LTCM, hai heebner)..

nice post, PS $2,200 for a 1BR in SOHO??

are you sure that # is right, i'd assume based soho studios would fetch more than that these days..

..and if you're listing it on CL, you can probly jack it up further considering brokers are charging 15% broker's fee these days (ouch)..

hol4, I'm being conservative because my apartment is not big (it's a true 1br, but it's small), and compared to the monster of a building close by that is charging $7000k for a 1br (not an exaggeration), I have no amenities. I could probably realistically rent for more because I have a recent renovation (~5 yrs old) and an elevator, and it's safe to say that if I just chose to rent it out, I'd make a reasonably big monthly profit.

Sunday: Oddly enough, the seller was an entrepreneur who bought into the building when it first turned co-op, and she lived here with her husband until they had a son. According to her lawyer, she held onto it "all these years" because this is the apartment that carried her through until she "made it." She rented it for a tidy profit before selling it; I to this day don't know why she sold. The closing docs listed her address as 15 CPW. My guess is she did not need my money at all. Makes for a really nice story, though, and given I was her age when she bought it, I'm hoping some of the inherent feng shui of the place will rub off on me :)

My money was in a mix of stocks and cash; when I got closer to the decision of buying, I stopped putting it in stocks and let it sit in a money market which was giving me practically nil return at the time. The extra money I had from not buying as much apartment as I could, I put into Apple stock...

But I think hol4 and Isle of Lucy are right in saying that the month-to-month analysis craziness that we all go through is really something you can't rely on to make your decision for you. It was the right place, and the right time, and my gut told me it was a good deal and would be a good space for me to have, for a very long time (ridiculously flexible sublet rules - it's a co-op). Taking the plunge wasn't the most natural thing, though, because everyone believed that rents would fall (and they did) in the interim, making it an overall "bad deal." Really, it's more a case of you'll never know...

"and compared to the monster of a building close by that is charging $7000k for a 1br (not an exaggeration), I have no amenities. "

Call that building up and pretend to be a renter.. more so than not, renters have to pay for the pool and gym, though they get 'community room' for free.. was the case with my unit in west 60's... so when my saavy tenant tried to bring comps when time to negotiate rent by saying XYZ building had these amenities, i knew off that bat that some of those amenities were'nt included in rent they were asking.. even if ur place really is a dump, as long as the bones are working (electric, time warner services, water, gas, no weird odors, etc) it's hard for me to even imaging 2.2k for a 1BR in soho.

>OK...a free $100K? Really?

to put it in a magnitude for Columbia County, NY, think of it as a "free $5K"

"The extra money I had from not buying as much apartment as I could, I put into Apple stock..."

So if you didn't buy the apartment, the $60K down payment would have resulted in about $200K in Apple stock capital gains?

Wow! Six whole hours before the vitriol. That has got to be a record for this site. That makes the positivity of this site near bullet proof.

where's vitriol Bill?

I think the vitriol came in subtle form at about 6:17PM today by a jealous idiot:

columbiacounty
about 4 hours ago
ignore this person
report abuse
OK...a free $100K? Really?

Sunday, for the size of my portfolio, I wouldn't have put the ~60k into any single stock in 2009; but I'm curious as to whether you did?

Only inonada would have done that, but only after he held a competition where Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos personally competed for inonada's investment dollars, and only after he turned down Mark Zuckerburg because Mark wasn't planning on doing any IPO any time soon (from 2009).

I forgot, Reed Hastings was also in the competition along with Captain Kirk along with the big Samoan guy.

booyakasha, no, I didn't buy $60K in Apple in 2009. I thought you could've since you only mentioned that one single Apple stock in the comment I quoted above. Now, I'm little confused by "not buying as much apartment as I could" part of the comment. So is that a lot of money left over or very little?

Just wanted everyone to know on Rennlist. I bought a 1987 911 for $5k in 2009. I see some rental cars charging $100/day and I know cabs costs have increased with all that fuel surcharge etc. I also see that other Rennlist members with a 2.7 sc models are asking $10k now. I can't begin to tell you how happy I am that I bought my 911 in 2009.

It's not a bull or bear story nor am I a used car salesman. Honestly. I'm just someone who made 100% on the car of my dreams and I know it's cheaper than taking a cab everyday.

Bless you all and have a great day! Xoxoxo.

Flmaozzzzzz. $300k?!!!!?!!!!?!! You think I give a shit about a rounding error on my 50 footer? No go ahead. Why don't you tell me about the used hyundai tiburon mkt!!!!!!!

How many bedrooms are in Apple stock?

Baesd on almost $333 billion in market cap, quite a few bedrooms.

>How many bedrooms are in Apple stock?

Good question. How many bedrooms are in a cup of coffee? Check out this current discussion thread: http://streeteasy.com/nyc/talk/discussion/27470-rent-subsidized-owneroccupied-eviction

Congrats, w67th!

You are congratulating him on a purchase from 2009?

I bought 2/3rds of the house I could afford at the time, the rest went into apple stock. It was a lot to me - I was 24 years old!

Sounds like you done good, booy. Congrats and thanks for the update!

What a great testimonial! Being in NY, we tend to get caught up in the "deal" aspects of the buying decision.

I also bought at a time that was considered the market peak. I hemmed & hawed, but it made sense in my case, for reasons similar to OP's. So far it's held its value, and I was able to refinance at a lower rate. Result - my 1 br in a doorman bulding is costing me less per month comparable rentals. And I have the comfort of not having to consider moving every year. And get to decorate/design the place the way I want

HEY booyakasha! This thread is on Brick Underground! :-))

http://www.brickunderground.com/blog/2011/07/lessons_from_a_300k_co_op_worth_400k_two_years_later?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BrickUnderground+%28Brick+Underground+RSS%29

Of course it is. Search for "streeteasy.com" at brickunderground to see what else they've picked up.

Whoaaaa that's crazy! Apparently my post has been internet immortalized beyond the world of Streeteasy. Thanks for the heads up!

And to think, Aboutready is on vacation.

BTW booyakasha if you had actually LISTENED to the posters on Streeteasy in March 2009 you would have known not to buy your apt since prices were bound to fall another 40%. Don't come here if you don't want our erudite advice.

@booya: Sounds like you got a good deal. I'm curious what the recent comps were in your line prior to your buy.

Any other factors for the good pricing? Nearby construction?

My buy was the first apartment in my line sold in over 10 years - the floors below me having been combined with their adjacent apartments to make bigger units. From what I could tell at the time (no longer a SE insider), I was getting ~2004/2005 pricing, if I remember correctly, based off units in other lines.

There were no real "warts" with the building when I went in contract. the upside since my buying is probably in part to due to vastly improved view (a pleasant surprise) for my line, thanks to a neighbor's construction, desirable commercial tenants moving into the immediate area, and all of the attention that is south of me with the restaurants, soho mews, the soho grand, and 350 W B'way. The streets that run parallel to me are also undergoing a tremendous amount of renovation and the whole area, though never looking "shabby" before, looks amazing now. This also makes it a more fun place to live. I really can't complain!

Jeez....just tell him congrats! Say what you want but home is home..if you love renting then rent. If you can't or don't want to buy don't. Remember the 80's anyone?

Its a big congrats.

My questions go more to addressing whether this was/is anything but an outlier. Seems she got a place in prime Soho for less than $600 a square foot and new construction next door wound up actually benefitting the new buyer. I don't think too many people would have passed by a deal like that. But not too many people got that opportunity, so that is a credit to the OP who found it and negotiated it.

Are there any kind of economic differences or ethnic differences between average upper east eide and upper west side?

booya... FSBO? found on your own or broker?

Found on my own - I was a maniac on SE for a long time, as well as NYT RE pages (which now seem somewhat behind the times and defunct). It was sold through a broker who took the entire listing down rather than keep it kicking it around on their servers, so it doesn't currently show up on SE at all.

Actually, with the info you posted it's very easy to identify the building and the apartments

"My questions go more to addressing whether this was/is anything but an outlier."

Not from where I sit. I did the same thing, purchased a 2 bed/ 1 bath condo in a prime neighborhood in October 2009. Elevator, doorman, true 2 bed, prewar. We paid $750 a square foot. Two units in the same line in my building have since (late 2010) closed for $1000 a square foot. One was only one floor above me, and the other was five floors up but faces the blind wall of the building next door, while we have a street view. There was a one bed, with a more open view, and that just sold for $150K more than we paid.

So, yes, 2009 was a very good year to buy. I wish we had purchased in Feb of 2009,one of our neighbors did and paid $700 a square foot.

We've also considered selling, but at this point everything else has caught up with what we would sell for. It would be six in one hand, half a dozen in the other. The only way to cash out (as in all real estate transactions) is to downgrade the apartment or the location, and frankly, I love our location. It fits our current lifestyle very well, it's only a 12 minute subway ride from where we need to be and there's plenty of grocery/food options. I like the apartment with 2 bedrooms, tons of closets, and a dining room table for 6.

Why such a deal? It's pretty obvious that no one would sell in 2009 unless they HAD to. It was a terrible time to sell, and selection was pretty thin at the time. Our seller had a boatload of second and third mortgages (her ACRIS listing was like a who's who of NY banking) on the property, and even though she bought in the late '90's her profit was miniscule. Some loans were coming due, and her credit was maxed out, so we offered a quick (30 days) closing.

Another factor to the deal was that it needed reno. The kitchen was from the 1960's and it needed all new cabinets and appliances. We did the work ourselves and the whole bill came to $9,000 (solid maple cabinets, too). The whole place needed to be painted, even the ceilings were nasty.

Sell it? Why would I? In a few years, when we retire to Florida, we can rent it out at will (condo) and then sell when we need $$.

BTW- now is the time to buy the retirement home in Florida and rent it to cover itself until we retire in it.

It's not rocket surgery.

Well, sounds like you did alright and got exactly what you wanted, but there still may be a $150 per square foot delta to what booya paid. Also, I'm not asking where you bought but I'd guess Soho was regularly pricing at 2x booya's per square foot purchase price the year before the purchase. In other words, your purchase may be less of an outlier for that time.

Needsadvice. So you saw the horse with broken teeth, a broken leg, and excessive flatulence with no other birders at auction, and you bid ask / retail (so that the owner could pay back her creditors), and you think you gotta 'bargain!!!!!!!'. Flmaozz.

Like a vulture fund that makes the seller, creditors and gives a tidy profit to the bankers shilling the company......... Wtf?

so it's all about retiring in florida

great