Think I can pick this up for 5m?

$1200 psf? Maybe a little more. My prediction was normal stuff goes to $700-800 psf, and high end can maybe keep a 2x premium, so $1500 for say a CPW, maybe a little less for standard high end.

but this is not cpw, it's park avenue. and it needs to be renovated. 1200 psf sounds perfectly plausible to me and don't be surprised if it goes for less than that. that said, those prices will take a while, and in the meantime someone else my buy it for more.

I think the price includes renovation, no?

You're speculating, right? John Burger (who I've never met) has a good reputation as a high-end broker and he's not going to misprice by that much.

ali r.
{downtown broker}

Yeah. Just wondering how much something like this, which appeals to me (Park Ave, full flr, condo, prewar) would go for. Not a fan of Park Ave, but that is the only negative.

> but this is not cpw, it's park avenue. and it needs to be renovated.

I agree... which is why I think its less than $1500... but still more than $1200.

The price includes renovation? I doubt it; the price is for the unit as you find it & it apparently needs work. However, the building is all floor-thru apartments & a prewar ON PARK AVENUE plus it's a condo, a rarity indeed; so I'm with ali, I'd say it's not badly priced. What the future holds, who knows? The carnage may have only begun but if you want to buy it today, there probably isn't too much wiggle room in the price. On the plus side, you won't have much problem finding an amenable contractor.

Ali, while I have no reason to doubt that your comments on the broker's reputation are spot on, given how illiquid and uncertain the market is, would it really be that surprising if any particular property ended up going for much less than the listing broker (even a very well-informed/professional listing broker) hopes or expects?

this could probably be yours for about $8M, 10023. I also know John B. and he is no fool.

The listing is for the 9th floor unit - all the other units that are identical (3-11) have closed for prices between 11.0m (4th floor) and 13.86m (10th flr). Anyone care to argue that the market isn't down?

Good work 10023. It seems this unit fell out of contract. If the developer got to keep the 10% deposit which I'd bet he did, he would really be getting about $11.3M for the unit. This assumes a 10% deposit on $13M + almost $10M current asking price. Say he was originally asking $13.5M, we are looking at a real price drop of around 15%.. Does this make sense?

You said that the seller would accept 8m. Assuming there was a forfeited deposit, that's 9.3m, which works out to a drop of over 28%.

The profiles of the buyers are interesting - financier, financier... blabla + 1 hockey player.

agentrachel, no, your logic does not make sense. The forfeited deposit is completely irrelevant to the discussion and the decision. If the owner won the lottery the day before he put his unit on the market, would you add his lottery winnings to the sale price to get a "market" price?

The unit will sell for the highest price that someone is willing to pay for it, and that price, by definition, is the "market" price. So if it's $8MM, that's 27% below the $11MM, and $42% below the $13.9MM.

newbuyer99 r u like a finance major or something? Some agents need to go get a degree from Lawrence Yun... .I heard he's hosting a seminar called " RE U too can be a RE Borker" :) Cheers from Cell Block C... M Xmas!

Holy shit. I can't believe that just came out of AgentRachel's mouth. Do you think before you speak? If you didn't think brokers were dumb before...

Newbuyer, i know for a fact that in a new development, the developer is often inclined to take a lower offer on a unit for which they have already received 10% of asking. Therefore, it is indeed relevant. Nyc, you are correct. If the developer does take $8M that is a much bigger drop. Lets see what it ends up going for... To be continued.

Seller doesn't set the price. Buyer does. Therefore irrelevant.

Agree Newbuyer. I'm sure it will go for at least $8M though... Its clear the developer wants to unload since they've dropped the price so much. I believe the price was just lowered recently so let's see if they get any offers...

Check out the RE tax.

I did - it's to be expected. If your prop. is worth 8m or whatever, you should be paying lots of property taxes. The 2 biggest real estate tax anomalies I know of in NYC - co-ops, in general, do NOT pay their fair share of property taxes and properties outside Manhattan also do NOT pay their fair share of taxes.

Interesting article I dug up on this bldg:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE5DD173FF937A35754C0A965958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2

Streetscapes: 823 Park Avenue; Is That the Ghost of '29 Out There?
CHRISTOPHER GRAY
Published: July 4, 1993

IT is a thought that makes any property owner's blood run cold -- owners abandoning a 38-unit prewar Park Avenue apartment house over about $750,000 in back taxes.
But that is what has happened at 823 Park Avenue, near East 75th Street. Although it seems that a dispute among the owners, the 823 Park Avenue Partnership, was as much the cause as the drop in the real estate market, it provokes another question: Could things get as bad as they were in the Depression? And how bad was it on Park Avenue?

One answer is that this is the second time its owners have lost 823 Park Avenue; the first time the building was emptied and rebuilt.

The initial reaction to the October 1929 crash by real estate professionals was relief. They felt the stock market was a sort of indecent crap game, siphoning off dollars that should have gone into stone, steel and bricks, whether from investors or potential homeowners.

Indeed, on Park Avenue between 59th and 96th Streets there were no foreclosures in 1930 and no wave of panic selling. But the next year four buildings were foreclosed -- mostly new, partly occupied structures like 778 and 895 Park Avenue. Despite continuing rosy predictions, this kept up throughout the 30's and into the mid-40's. By 1945, 52 of the 105 big apartment houses on this stretch of Park Avenue had gone through foreclosure or been bought back by the mortgage holder in lieu of foreclosure. This even happened twice to 791, 1085 and 1192 Park and three times to 891 Park.

Metropolitan Life Insurance took back the most, 17, but there were no tax foreclosures. Unlike the recent case at 823 Park Avenue, where there was no mortgage, in the 30's there were lenders to step in before tax arrears became a problem.

In rental buildings the mechanism was simple: Rents came down. But in the co-ops ownership complicated the issue. The falling market slowed sales and even when temporary subleasing was permitted the lower rents often did not cover maintenance charges. Shareholders began walking away from apartments, exacerbating the problems for the remaining tenants.

In 1936, one 60-unit building had four shareholders who were at least a year behind in their maintenance.

The building at 823 Park Avenue was erected in 1912, a near duplicate of 829 Park Avenue, put up the year before. Designed by Pickering and Walker, it had 12 duplexes, each with a library, living room and dining room across the front, a kitchen and three servants' rooms in the middle and four master bedrooms at the rear, in the upper part of the duplex. Interior photographs show a 55-foot sweep from the dining room through to the library, and kitchens with dinosaur-sized appliances.

Twelve apartments is not a very broad base, especially with such large apartments in times of shrinking expectations, and in 1940 the shareholders gave the building back to the principal lender, the Dry Dock Savings Bank, and the building was emptied. Dry Dock called in Edgar Ellinger, who had just drastically cut down the large apartments in the bank's Alwyn Court apartments on 58th Street and Seventh Avenue, and Louis S. Weeks, the bank's consulting architect.

They developed a plan to make 38 two- to four-room apartments in place of the original 12. They introduced push-button elevators, kitchenettes, glass-block partitions and an outside servants' bathroom on each public hallway.

A 1942 advertisement in The New York Times promoted "The New 823 Park Avenue . . . . With only three apartments per floor you are assured of an atmosphere of peace and quiet."

THE work at 823 Park Avenue reflected a wave of similar alterations. Most buildings had just a few apartments cut up, but Metropolitan Life emptied 969 Park Avenue, between 82d and 83d Streets, in 1940 and reconstructed it, and City Bank Farmer's Trust did the same with most of 970 Park Avenue.

The facades of the buildings changed little, but inside it was as if completely new buildings had gone up, with corresponding social changes. Park Avenue was an elite thoroughfare: In 1930, 70 percent of the tenants at 823 were in the Social Register.

Most other buildings on Park Avenue, except those that were predominantly Jewish, had similar percentages. But in 1950, after reconstruction, only 10 percent of 823 Park Avenue's tenants were in the Social Register.

At 830 Park Avenue, which had been through foreclosure but not wholesale reconstruction, the drop was only to 30 percent.

The foreclosures and alterations stopped only a year or two after World War II. The turmoil of the Depression years is invisible; Park Avenue looks much as it did in the peak years of the 1920's.

Remembering just how bad it can get is not a comforting thought