Sale at Astor Court #9L

Quality still sells, even when the place needs work. Overlooking the English Gardens, my wife would die for this place. Sigh. A little beyond what we would want to pay, especially if it requires $200k in renovations. A nice dream. I hope somebody brings it back to life.

seems like a real nice one bedroom...the price staggers the imagination.

I saw this apartment months ago when we were thinking of buying and spinnakers comments are spot on. I was enchanted with the space, though it was out of our price range then before the reductions. If only I had a budget that included enough to do a major renovation, I would have loved to make an offer on the apartment. Totally empty, the space made me want to twirl through the big rooms. It has the potential to be smashing. The second bedroom and bathroom were the only rooms to overlook the courtyard, so that wasn't a huge draw. The rest of the rooms faced Broadway.

waxlion721: I didn't quite imagine a twirl but I do understand your sentiments! My vision was more along the lines of setting up my table saw in the livingroom for a glorious 4 months of transformation.

800 psf

spinnaker1
You own a tablesaw? Cool. I used to rent shop space out in Brooklyn when I was building furniture. I lost that space. Do you have some place to use your table saw now? I didn't see the apartment at Astor Court, what kind of work did it need?

I have done some renovation work on my current apartment, including plastering the ceiling myself in order to replace the popcorn ceiling. That job nearly killed me, working for weeks at a time over my head. I got pretty good at walking around on drywall stilts and never fell, although I did walk into a door once. The results are worth it, everyone who sees it says it looks great. I don't think they have any idea how painful it was to do it.

407PAS - I do own a little table saw and a few other select tools salvaged from my shop on Vancouver Island where I built furniture and renovated houses for few years. For this apartment, if it were mine, I would expand the kitchen and custom build the cabinets, restore original trim, gut the bathrooms and restore with marble and period replicas etc., etc. And I would definitely get someone else to skim coat.

Hiring someone to do this work, including architect and filings and building engineer review and expediters with top-end finishes and skim coating would run $300,000 easily from the description spinnaker1 gave, I think. If I had my own tables saw I could do it for maybe $200,000 plus cost of micro-surgery for reattachment of finger(s).

If money didn't matter (what a thought) I'd love to play with this place and make it unbelievable--as a one bedroom with nice guest room/office.

Looks like we can all agree its a great space but what about price??? Is this a smart investment at 1.3M considering a 300k reno? If it was completely done would you pay 1.6M for a 4 room apartment? A lot of great classic 6's out there at this price point.

We looked at this place, too, and as others have written, it has splendid potential -- gorgeous light, a working fireplace, high ceilings, and despite being on Broadway, the new windows make it quiet. We estimated it needs between 300K and 400K (all electrical, all plumbing, re-do walls, 2 new baths, new kitchen). That didn't bother us since we're looking for a wreck to renovate. But what we didn't like was the state of the building: the hallways were dirty and grim, filled with neighbors' hallway junk like old doormats and tables that looked like things their kids made in shop; the hallway walls and doors obviously hadn't had a new coat of paint in decades and probably a vacuuming in weeks. The lobby is shabby and the elevators seem ancient. We didn't want to put that much money into a renovation and end up in an under-maintained building with a fading reputation for good management.

The biggest concern to us is that center communal garden which is over-grown and not well maintained, and the walls covered in ivy: we were told that the building is overdue to do Local Law 11 work and the price tag to re-point all those bricks that have had their mortar eaten away by the cement-eating ivy will mean a gigantic assessment and at least a year of scaffolding.

Anyone looking to buy here should absolutely inquire about prospects and timing for capital improvements.

Thanks to everyone for enlightening me to the costs involved in taking on a project like this one. Whew, $300k+ is a lot more then I would be willing to put into the place, so this is all for the best.

In the end, the maintenance of the buildings gets us all. Everything is expensive to repair or replace and shareholders balk at maintenance increases, but the repairs have to be done or the housing stock deteriorates.

If I recall correctly, Local Law 11 was passed because Local Law 10 said the developers had to repoint only the walls facing the street. After a back wall collapsed on the Upper West Side, they passed 11 saying that all walls had to be repointed. Yeah, eventually the walls fall down.

It is too bad the management company does not keep the hallways clear, a fire hazard in my mind, and paint and clean them. Those spaces give an overall impression of the building to prospective buyers and only help improve property values in the building when they look nice.

spinnaker1,
Yes, I probably should have hired someone else to do the skimcoating. Call it temporary insanity. I came away from that job with a deep respect for the old time plaster guys and what they did in all those pre-war buildings. It is all hard work and not richly rewarded, at that.

I rented shop space from two professional cabinetmakers. I thought about going into the biz at one point but the experience of the guy who had been doing it for 16 years made me think twice. He was incredibly talented and had turned out some stunning cabinets, but working at a fixed price with every extra hour eating into your profit seems like a bad way to go. The business never made him a lot of money and he eventually gave up the shop space.

kylewest,
Stay away from the tablesaw. It is generally true that cabinetmakers look at each other's hands when they first meet, in order to count fingers. Bad things can happen to the best of craftsmen, it is part of the risk involved with those kind of tools. It is no joke. I was always very careful and never had any accidents but it can happen.

Local Law 11 goes beyond 10 and is the most comprehensive, expensive one yet. Repointing is not enough to comply. Bricks actually have to be sounded and removed where water has infiltrated and if there is corrosion the infrastructure itself has to be repaired. By the time you are done with the engineers inspections, the erection of a sidewalk scaffold (the "bridge") for the duration, the bidding of the repair job, the erection of a full scaffold and then repairs, you could be talking 2+years for the project and more money than you can imagine. If the building hasn't been well-maintained, this could be eye-popping. One 90-year old well-kept terracotta Chelsea building I know was 13 stories and spent $2.5MM on repairs during Local Law 11. Granted the terracotta upped the complexity, but it was smaller than this building. When looking for apartments, I asked about Local Law 11 compliance at every open house and was hesitant to consider a place that hadn't yet complied because of the uncertainty of what an engineer would turn up.

When using power tools, I generally get all set up, including placing my cell phone on a nearby surface and dialing "9" and "1" so that all I have to do is hit another "1" with whatever bloody appendage might later be available.

I recommend the following book called: How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built by Stewart Brand,

http://www.amazon.com/How-Buildings-Learn-Happens-Theyre/dp/0140139966/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235326211&sr=8-1

This book explores how buildings adapt over time, in terms of maintenance, repairs, the needs of the owners, etc.

kylewest,
That's a good idea to ask about Local Law 11 compliance. Have the agents at the open houses been able to answer your question about whether the building complies with the law? I didn't realize the law had resulted in such high costs being levied against the buildings.

Not a bad idea to keep your phone ready to dial 911. I used to work alone on the weekends so I was extra careful when using the machines.

About 95% of brokers don't understand Local Law cycles, why #11 is such an onerous one, or whether any given building has complied. They do, however, always offer to get back to me with the info if I'm interested. It is a very important part of due diligence for any buyer, but before spending money on a lawyer to conduct the due diligence, asking some questions about the Local Law compliance and getting preliminary answers may cause you to decide the building isn't for you.

kylewest,
Thanks for the tip, very helpful. I will definitely push harder to find out about Local Law compliance before bidding on any particular unit.

210 West 90th #9L closed for $1.25MM. I think we're all rooting for the buyer (and the contractor) on this one.

OK that's it, I'm now a confirmed fan. I resisted for a while, mainly because everyone else was piling it on. I thought there may not be enough room for me in the club house. But holly cow, what a follow-up to a long abandoned thread! You keep notes don't you? I knew it!

I really wanted to see 1.05 here, but after all it is spring. Love is in the air. Thanks West81st, YOU ROCK!!!

spin, resistance is futile. love is in the air. west81st does rock.

Ponderous. Definitely not as low as many expected.