Third & Bond Blog
April 24, 2008
Inside Third & Bond: Week 34
Today the Third & Bond crew contemplates the financial impact of making, or not making, the 421-a deadline later this year.
With the flowers in bloom (tra-la-la) and sunny 70-degree days here at last, it finally feels like spring. In not too long the City’s 421-a office will start stamping applications, “rejected” and we’ll all know the last residential projects in brownstone Brooklyn to squeak through before the 421-a deadline. Although DOB is still sitting on our underpinning permit – making it impossible to pull the approved new building permits, we aren’t worried about missing the June 30th deadline (yet).
The 421-a abatement for this project means a considerable difference in taxes – our appraisal put the value of the abatement for the project as a whole at $2.7 million. For the buyer of a typical two-bedroom at Third & Bond, we estimate monthly taxes of $63. If the project did not have a 421-a exemption, monthly taxes would be more like $909, a whopping increase of $846/month.
Yikes, right?
If this buyer wanted or had to keep the same monthly carrying costs, then the price she would be willing to pay for the unit without 421-a tax abatement would be substantially less than for the same apartment with 421-a. In other words...
April 10, 2008
Inside Third & Bond: Week 32
What do you call someone who compiles and analyzes voluminous data of problematical accuracy from sources of dubious veracity and derives therefrom a numerical quantification of value commensurate with ambient configurations of the open market and promulgates thereby a precise written declamation which delineates his observation, deliberations and conclusions all done while he feigns absolute ignorance of the machinations of Buyers, Sellers, Brokers and Lenders, compensated only by that penurious stipend known as the professional fee?
An appraiser, of course!
Okay, so that joke, which we got from an appraiser humor website, would have gotten high-fives in an appraisal office but will probably earn us crabby comments here. Still, it’s an apt lead-in to this week’s topic of appraisals, something that ends up sounding much more complicated than it needs to be in part because of the layers of jargon that come along with it. It’s really pretty simple: the bank wants an independent opinion of the market value of the project they are lending money on and we want a high appraisal so the bank will lend us as much money as possible and we can spend our equity elsewhere.
It’s not quite white-knuckle time, but we are watchful of the appraisal inputs and outputs...
April 3, 2008
Inside Third & Bond: Week 31
We thought we’d take a break this week from the technical how-to-tell-a-helical-pile-from-a-wingnut discussion and offer something a little bit different: an interview with our architect, Jonathan Marvel of Rogers Marvel Architects.
Without the architect, every project would end up looking like the drawings 2nd graders tape to the front of the refrigerator: a window on each side of the door and a smoking chimney. The architecture team is absolutely essential to the project in ways that are completely unsung in this age of starchitects. Without the keen insight of the designers, our worst ideas would not be fettered out and without their unrelenting examination of every detail, even our best ideas would be rendered clumsy and unkempt in the physical form. Not to mention that they manage to make us feel like we have brilliant design ideas, despite a sneaking suspicion that they aren’t really our ideas at all.
For these postings to really capture what it’s like to be in development, you have to experience at least a little bit of what it’s like to work with a team of designers who have their own language and way of seeing the world—and whose livelihood depends on their ability to translate that back into the languages of business, community, and construction. The simplest way we could think of to share that experience with you was to pose some questions and let the architect speak for himself.