When you spend all day obsessing about houses and apartments, it’s easy to forget about the land that they sit on. Conventional real estate wisdom, however, holds that housing itself is a depreciating asset while it’s the value of the land underneath that fluctuates. There aren’t a lot of single lots left for development in Clinton Hill and Fort Greene, so we were interested to see this the For Sale sign on this slightly oversized (27-by-106 feet) lot at 140 Clinton Avenue. Located north of Myrtle Avenue (and outside the Historic District), the lot is zoned R5B and thus has a relatively low FAR of 1.35. Translation: Someone can build a 3,950-square-foot structure as of right. Typically, the key metric a developer looks at in this case is the price per buildable square foot. In this case, it’s $175, which seems about right given that it’ll probably cost the buyer another $300 to $325 per foot to build the house itself. So at the end of the day, you’ve got your custom house for about $500 a foot or, in this case, about $2 million. Sound about right?
140 Clinton Avenue [Massey Knakal] GMAP