One Brooklyn Bridge Park Cuts Prices 9%

FYI. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a4gQsZHjJ_Hw One Brooklyn Bridge Park Cuts Condominium Prices to Spur Sales By Sharon L. Lynch Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- New York’s One Brooklyn Bridge Park, the luxury waterfront condominium complex that remained two-thirds unsold after 17 months on the market, reduced prices on about 50 apartments to spur sales. Marketers of the... [more]

FYI. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a4gQsZHjJ_Hw One Brooklyn Bridge Park Cuts Condominium Prices to Spur Sales By Sharon L. Lynch Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- New York’s One Brooklyn Bridge Park, the luxury waterfront condominium complex that remained two-thirds unsold after 17 months on the market, reduced prices on about 50 apartments to spur sales. Marketers of the former Jehovah’s Witnesses facility cut prices on some interior units by between 3 percent and 9 percent, developer Robert Levine said. The 14-story building shattered Brooklyn’s price ceiling when real estate maven Elizabeth Stribling agreed in March to pay $6.05 million to live there. “We have adjusted prices, but it’s not an across-the-board thing,” sales manager Evelyn Cole said. “We’ve had a tremendously good response. The phones were ringing.” The decision comes after New York City apartment prices fell in every one of New York’s five boroughs except Manhattan in the third quarter, including an 11 percent drop in Brooklyn, according to the Real Estate Board of New York. The median price in Brooklyn, the city’s most populous borough, fell to $500,000 as the three-year U.S. housing slump came to the city. Prices at One Brooklyn Bridge Park range from $525,000 for a 782-square-foot studio overlooking the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to $7.75 million for a 4,600-square-foot penthouse with wraparound views, four bedrooms and terraces that approach 1,000-square-feet. “We have adjusted pricing on select units to be more consistent to our initial offering prices in February of 2007,” Levine, chief executive officer of project developer RAL Companies & Affiliates LLC, said in an e-mail. “This creates some great incentives and opportunities to prospective buyers.” Courtyard Views The price cuts were on units that face courtyards rather than those with views of lower Manhattan across the East River. Levine said last month he was reluctant to reduce prices because doing so would hurt the investment of earlier buyers who paid more. The reductions since then return some units to price levels set when the initial sales offering was published, Levine said. Prices were raised when the market was booming. The Brooklyn property was built as a shipping warehouse in 1928 and sold to a joint venture between RAL and a real estate fund of New York-based American International Group Inc. in 2004. New U.S. home prices have fallen 17 percent since March 2007 to a median of $218,400, according to the Census Bureau. At One Brooklyn Bridge Park, brokers sold 18 units between March of this year and early November, compared with an average of 14 a month in each of the prior 10 months. The end of the city’s traditional June-August sales lull failed to lift sales at One Brooklyn Bridge as subprime mortgage-related losses worldwide climbed toward $966 billion and job cuts to 166,000. About two-thirds of the 449 units in the 1.2-million-square- foot building were unsold at the start of this month, according to Levine. Deutsche Bank AG funded the purchase and development of the property with a $290 million mortgage and $40.2 million in mezzanine funding, according to public records on the New York City Department of Finance Web site. To contact the reporter on this story: Sharon L. Lynch in New York at sllynch@bloomberg.net Last Updated: November 19, 2008 15:56 EST [less]