Open House Picks

Oh my, 9th St. is pretty. I guess I like the way the furniture fits with the layout. But obviously you're not buying the furniture.

So let's see -- with 25 percent down, that'd be only, um, $16,000 a month! Or something like that. But I imagine the "high income" rental on the first floor will offset that.

Miss Muffet, what are they currently getting for the first-floor rental? $10 billion? Is that in dollars or pounds sterling?

Posted by: mopar at July 17, 2009 1:25 PM

'Course, only 43 brownstones changed hands in all of Northwest Brooklyn last quarter. So they only need to find 8 or 10 or so rich families who really want to live in Park Slope and can put down $750,000 or $1.3 million in cash.

(But think of the money they will save by sending their kids to public school and shopping at the Coop.)

It's actually not that difficult to imagine there are a dozen or so families buying at these prices every year in Park Slope. Like that Google guy (well, that was more). Lots of competition in New York, I guess.

Posted by: mopar at July 17, 2009 1:29 PM

I've also been trying to see that Decatur St. house for months and could never get a showing. I hear there are two others for sale in the same block (coincidence).

Posted by: mopar at July 17, 2009 1:31 PM

I am drooling over the details in the Clinton Hill house. But the layout in the floor plan looks like a nightmare. We have seen so many places like this, but the whole "use the parlor as the bedroom" just doesn't work.

Posted by: mopar at July 17, 2009 1:39 PM

Darlings, there is a new listing on Bainbridge St. in Stuyvesant Heights for $1.2 million.

More4Less, we were trying to get in to see that other property for months some time ago. Never did get to see it.

Posted by: mopar at July 17, 2009 2:36 PM

I think we actually might be near a bottom in the Eastern part of Brooklyn.

Posted by: mopar at July 17, 2009 2:37 PM

No, I haven't seen 148 Bainbridge St.

Posted by: mopar at July 17, 2009 2:40 PM

Right here, darlings. And no floor plan!

http://www.corleyre.com/address.php?property_ID=261

Posted by: mopar at July 17, 2009 2:41 PM

Jack Slade, the $1.2 million house is in prime Stuyvesant Heights. The photos they do show are nice, but they leave out a lot. And divided into four units -- well, it's more income but probably compromises the layout. I would be surprised if it got anywhere near that much, but maybe someone can enlighten me.

Posted by: mopar at July 17, 2009 3:25 PM

Jack Slade, both the Decatur house and the Bainbridge house we're discussing here are in Stuyvesant Heights, which is not near Broadway.

Posted by: mopar at July 17, 2009 4:03 PM

No clue if it was an SRO.

I just found the Case-Schiller document from McGraw Hill that I lost. Their ten-city composite index shows a drop of only 7 percent after the 1989 crash! Then prices came back up in 2001, then down again, then back up, etc. The same chart shows that we're currently down 20 percent, which is true.

Posted by: mopar at July 17, 2009 4:40 PM

Denton - yeah, the 87 crash. Stock market in 87, housing crash in 89. The housing crash was nationwide.

Point is, the people were asking this week about past patterns.

Here's the pattern for the 87/89 crash: For two years, the market goes down. Surprisingly small dip. Then flat. More than ten years to get back to peak. I'm just giving information here.

Like I said earlier, I think Eastern Brooklyn (e.g. the subprime areas) may be close to a bottom.

No, I'm not including today's listing of $1.2 million on Bainbridge!!!

Posted by: mopar at July 17, 2009 5:20 PM

Rob, here's yet another example of people using windfalls from housing run-up to buy a place. It sounds plenty big for their family. From NYT real estate article this week about people who are forced to sell because of relocation, divorce, or new baby:

"Until then, Mr. Rogers, his wife, Gillian, and their two small children had been comfortably ensconced in a four-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot condo in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. The couple bought it for $599,000 in cash in January 2006, after selling the Hell’s Kitchen apartment they had outgrown for $920,000 at the height of the market, and pocketing a profit that was three times what they had paid.

They hoped to make a similar killing by buying into another gentrifying neighborhood.

“I used what I called the Starbucks index,” Mr. Rogers said. “There were no Starbucks around in Hell’s Kitchen when I bought there, and when I sold there were four. There were no Starbucks here either when I bought.” "

Posted by: mopar at July 18, 2009 10:34 AM

Well, on the topic of Mr. Rogers: I really wanted to email him and suggest that, in Switzerland, his family cut their housing costs in half by downsizing to a smaller apt, just as the Swiss do. Meanwhile, they should rent out their Clinton Hill spot for whatever the current going rate is (not more) because it's not costing them anything.

It seems like their current approach is really economically unsound.

In Switzerland, upper middle class families live as the middle class do here. Dual-income couples with professional jobs and two children live in two-bedroom apts. Either the parents take the living room or the kids share a bedroom.

It's all very nice and attractive and clean. Beds fold up and all so you would never know the living room serves as a bedroom at night.

Posted by: mopar at July 19, 2009 6:43 PM

The porch does look lovely.

Posted by: mopar at July 19, 2009 6:52 PM