It’s a rich man’s problem, but when a broker has a lot of listings, the risk is that one can make another look pretty bad by comparison. Such is the case with two townhouse listings of Elliman power broker Kathryn Lilly. She recently got the listing for a house at 211 Carlton Avenue which is a classic brownstone (except for the stoop alteration) in a good Fort Greene location. The house traded for $1,580,000 in October 2006 so the current asking price of $2,650,000 may be a bit aggressive even though it appears that the owner’s doing a pretty extensive reno. Aggressive maybe, but not completely insane, like Lilly’s other listing at 171 Greene Avenue. We’ve written several posts over the last year about the owner’s fruitless efforts to sell off this place as three condos at exorbitant prices, so when we heard that he had changed tactics and put the whole house on the market we thought that maybe he’d come to his senses. Apparently not. The asking price, at a whopping $2.5 million, is just as high as he was asking for the three units collectively. This place is overpriced by a good $1 million in our opinion. So now Lilly has the awkward problem of having two houses priced about the same, one an original brownstone a block from Fort Greene Park, the other a recently constructed house on a heavily trafficed portion of Greene Avenue in Clinton Hill. We’re not sure how she’s supposed to sell the latter with a straight face. Brokers, how do you handle a situation like this?
211 Carlton Avenue [Elliman] GMAP P*Shark
171 Greene Avenue [Elliman] GMAP P*Shark