A Tale of 2 EV Townhouses

Ignoring the price for a moment, the one on second street is not really renovated to the standard of today’s townhouse buyer. Then there is commercialesque space at the bottom. Many buyers will look at this as a gut Reno project.
Location better for 7th street but still East Village for both.

That said, I would have thought 7th street would have sold for 10mm ish. And 2nd street fair price is probably $1mm lower.

On the 7th street, the taxes are incredibly low. So add $1mm. $10-12mm is what I would have thought.

$15,750,000 for a landmarked 1837 facade? I was thinking maybe somebody next door or with an abutting property bought it, but that doesn't seem likely based on what's around it. Perhaps an unfortunate accident will occur during renovation and the poor property owner will have no choice but to demolish it and redevelop the site.

113 2nd St. isn't even landmarked.

7th street is already renovated as per the listing description.

Could it have to do with the fact that it's configured as a two-family building? Is there a tenant they can't get rid of? Would recreating a single-family use space be overly costly?

Which one?

AFAIK it's currently totally vacant.

If I'm reading the description of the first one correctly, it sounds like it is fully renovated and 25 ft wide. Widths of 25ft and wider seem to command a massive premium as compared to 20ft and narrower. I personally think it is a bit silly, but that tends to be the case.

It seems that brokers are struggling to advise owners on appropriate sales prices for a lot of townhouses, so a lot of them are just languishing on the market. I think that people who owned these houses got a warped view of their value drilled into their heads and coming to reality seems particularly painful, perhaps because the comps are harder to specify.

2nd street is also 25 foot wide. Premium (not saying what the right price or percentage premium is) over say 20 foot is justified as in a 20 foot you can’t have two side by side bedrooms and percentage of wasted space is much higher in 20 foot (exterior walls, stairs, hallway, landings all use up the same square footage. Also parlor floor is much grander in a wider townhouse. 18 foot starts to feel like rail road apartment.

NB the whole reason I chose these 2 is because they are both 25 footers.

However I'll also note that you have to look at style as well as width (which is often overlooked by the marketplace). A 16 foot Italianate often has grander rooms than a 20 foot Federal.

30, Do you mind posting a couple of random samples of each - just for fun?

It's something I became acutely aware of when I owned 27 West 9th St (see those checkerboard linoleum floors in the garden duplex and 3rd floor units? I laid those myself). Compare the living room of the house (the front room in this unit:
https://streeteasy.com/rental/1688289)
With the same width house at 43 West 12th St:
https://streeteasy.com/sale/1396794?featured=1
With the 22.5 foot wide 127 West 12th St:
https://streeteasy.com/sale/1363390?featured=1

Thank you. So higher ceilings on the parlor floor generally in Italianate? Federal facade naturally is nothing special.

In Italianate you usually have a short stoop and the parlor is one flight up as opposed to the level where the entry is.

TeamM
I agree with your comments about the pricing difficulties in the townhouse market. OTOH when one comes on at what seems to be a reasonable price there's a flurry of activity. Look at 219 East 17th St https://streeteasy.com/sale/1402760
As far as I can tell, they put it on the market, got a flurry of activity, raised the price, and then were so confused that they took it off the market. All in less than 2 months.

My mistake. I did not realize that the second house is also 25 ft wide.

I considered 2nd street one when it was a court sale but was $1mm lower than the actual sale price as I was concerned about market depth for fully renovated house in that location.

Which reminds me of the old joke about laying linoleum.

It didn't take long to come back on the market. What will they get this time? And where is TeamM?

Hmm, a 20% price increase over 2019 while the East Village is falling apart? If the townhouse market was tough to price in 2019, it is a crap-shoot now, but certainly nowhere near this price. As was the case decades ago, if people continue to feel less safe in NY, single family houses are going to trade at a significant discount to apartments.

I am not sure why folks use an LLC to buy property, and then sign the document themselves. But it appears this was bought by one of the great computer science minds of our time and co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

"use an LLC to buy property, and then sign the document themselves"

"Privacy" isn't the only reason. Can also be for estate planning, joint ownership, or other reasons.

nyc_sport,
You this had anything to do with the decision?
https://nypost.com/2020/07/29/cleared-out-east-village-homeless-camp-pops-up-across-the-street/