Real Estate

Open House Picks 10 Years Later: Townhouses Cost a Lot More Now

This month marks Brownstoner’s Steel Anniversary. We’re taking some time to look back at our past, even as we design a new future. In celebration of Brownstoner’s steel anniversary, we’re taking a look at how our first-ever Open House Picks fared — 10 years later. That post, in January 2005, featured two Park Slope townhouses,…

by Cate Corcoran

10/29/2015 3 minute 0

This month marks Brownstoner’s Steel Anniversary. We’re taking some time to look back at our past, even as we design a new future.

In celebration of Brownstoner’s steel anniversary, we’re taking a look at how our first-ever Open House Picks fared — 10 years later. That post, in January 2005, featured two Park Slope townhouses, a brownstone in Boerum Hill and a brownstone (painted white) in Bed Stuy.

Asking prices were about half what they are now. The Bed Stuy house, for example, a three-story job, wanted $545,000.

They all sold within six months — two above ask, two slightly below.

Now, a decade later, all but the Boerum Hill house have sold again. It’s worth noting that one house went condo. Each of its individual three units are now worth about what the whole house was when it last sold.

The most expensive of the bunch, the Park Slope house at 464 9th Street asking $2,045,000, sold for $2,000,000 in 2005, and then sold again for $2,482,000 in 2012 — just before the recent jump in prices. That’s the living room in the house pictured above.

The Park Slope house at 401 10th Street sold for $1,300,000 in 2005, and eventually became condos. The most recent sale in the three-unit building was Unit 1, which went for $1,410,000 in 2013.

The Boerum Hill house at 36 Saint Marks Place sold for $1,326,000 in 2005, and hasn’t gone on the market since.

The Bed Stuy house went for $567,500 in 2005, then sold again just a few years later, for $849,000 in 2007. But it too hasn’t gone on the market since then.

The upshot: It was a boom time in 2005, with crowded open houses and bidding wars, and it’s a boom time now. Prices stayed pretty flat in the intervening years, from about 2008 to 2012.

Most of the gains of the past 10 or 11 years have been since 2012. Prices overall (all housing types) have almost doubled in most of these areas, data from PropertyShark shows.