How Low Will It Go? (Yorkville edition)

Maintenance.

The 4th floor gets a million dollars cheaper every 3 months... https://streeteasy.com/sale/1305059

50% down. We have a listing with this type of financing restriction and it's been very slow going, even with a very appropriate price.

Maintenance

They ought to sever the "staff" room and sell it as a studio (shedding $800 or so on the maintenance), assuming that is allowed. Not a lot of people looking for $1.3MM apartments have "staff." Needing to go through a bedroom to any bathroom is not very luxurious. Yet, same apartment (much better renovated) 2 floors lower sold for $2.4MM 3 years ago, and 5 floors lower for $2.2MM. The times, they are a changing.

At a certain point lowering the price hurts rather than helping because everyone the low price attracts can't cope with Coop issues (mtc, financing, etc)

>>>They ought to sever the "staff" room and sell it as a studio (shedding $800 or so on the maintenance), assuming that is allowed.<<<

How? There's no plumbing. Better bet would be to try to sell staff room to neighbors on the 3rd floor, or to another resident for storage...

30, IDK. I'm the sort of buyer a co-op board should love, but I hate the idea of a coop. As with Carnegie House, eventually the price gets low enough that maybe I put on a really fake smile for the interview and tough it out. That price, however, for a building that's practically in Astoria, is lower than this price, esp since I could get the same thing on Park Ave.

The question is how will such buildings fare if the market goes down? Usually worse than average. One of the best Real Estate plays is to buy in "unsellable" buildings after the market crashes because when the market gets better there are huge returns. For example I can't even count how many studios I sold in Tudor City below $20,000, there were tons of 1 BRs sold at 250 Mercer St under $150,000 etc
I know I've told this story before, but it's a perfect example of what I'm talking about above:
We had this unit on the market @$199,000 and got no interest because everyone objected to the "high maintenance":
https://streeteasy.com/sale/1385512
Then we raised the price to $299,000 and within a couple of weeks it was in contract for $275,000.

My husband and I are like George to the extent that we don’t like coops, but in our preferred neighborhood, the value was too hard to resist. With that said, we probably would have bought a condo at 845 UN Plaza, price differential per square foot notwithstanding, if it had not been a Trump building. Very few condos in the Beekman area, and each of those had issues we could not stomach so we chose lesser of known evils and went coop. FWIW, we have not regretted it and quite like our coop.

And that is why I keep predicting the crash in Coops: because as the price on Condos keeps going down the price that these Coop owners will have to offer at in order to induce buyers who don't want to buy Coops to say "but at that number how can I say no?" falls to what? And remember that still only gets you part of the buyer pool because a significant portion of it just can't buy in these Coops.

"How? There's no plumbing. " Wow. Didn't look at the floorplan. What is the point of a staff room for a live in that can't be lived in? Some of the other listings that were selling them separately said they had baths. That is an expensive storage locker.

@30yrs - Totally agree. This is why we do not expect our coop purchases to appreciate and indeed expect them to depreciate.

@nyc_sport - A number of residents in our building use these rooms as exercise rooms. They are just big enough for a Peloton or a treadmill. To the extent one actually had a domestic employee that one wanted to house in such a room, there are multiple communal full baths in the hall of the wing where all of these rooms are located, much like the dorm housing depicted in Downton Abby.

The Dakota used to have staff rooms with a shared bath--might still. It's possible this is/was a similar situation.

I think this shows an interesting shift in lifestyles: who has live-in help for a 2 BR apartment these days?

@30 looks like that listing you sold for 275k appreciated a little bit. ; )

Just in case there's someone who didn't look:
https://streeteasy.com/sale/1198396

But let's keep pretending the market isn't down.

I don't think there is a soul in New York City who doesn't think the market is going down. It's been going down since the end of 2015... Who is saying the market's not going down?

Is this the listing you sold for 275k? I'm just pointing out it looks like it's appreciated a bit since that sale.

https://streeteasy.com/sale/1385512

Wow. I think 30 probably bought a bunch of real estate for himself back in the day which became 5-10x. I would have liked to do that trade.

But I neither had the money or any understanding of Manhattan real estate in 1990 plus minus a few years.

Last time, QE1 and QE2 hold the market flat for 2 years, and QE3 created the current bubble.

Let's see what's coming after the recent QE4

Just looked at price history - am I reading it correctly that they have been trying to sell this since 2017 and have lowered the price by $1,000,000 since then? I wonder if this will run into a price protection issue if it gets a taker at current price as that bargain on Park Ave may have. If I weren’t already ensconsed in an apartment of similar profile, I would be tempted by this.

If I weren't firmly where I was, I'd be interested to. I'd use the 3rd floor room as a little office space. It would be bigger than the 5x5 foot walk in closet I've currently got. And far away from anybody else who might be rattling around the apartment and distracting me from work. Might consider opening the 2nd bedroom into the LR, turning it into a full-time library / occasional guest room.

There's not a single bathroom or kitchen picture -- may need significant updating, thus extra cost.

Wondering why the maintenance increased 25 percent from 2017 listing to current listing?