What Price Vacant Land?
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…
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
Seems to me that if we taxed ourselves differently .. taxing that which we, as individuals do not create — the land value — and untaxing that which we create individually — the house itelf (and, for that matter, our wages), we’d be better off.
That land would not be sitting vacant right now. A land speculator would not be asking a high price for value he had nothing to do with creating.
One more family would have a home.
One vacant lot would have disappeared. (Probably many.)
And value we all create would be used to finance the services that make the neighborhood a good place to live. That revenue would be recycled locally, over and over and over, instead of accruing into private pockets.
Take a look at http://www.henrygeorge.org/cgnyc/index.html
Hey, what about that sign? Think it is BIG ENOUGH???? Massey Knakal likes BIG SIGNS. It is the broker for a building for sale next door to me and I couldn’t believe the size of the sign. I came home from a trip and it was hanging perpendicular to the house on an arm 5 feet long, letters one foot high, sign 4 feet square. I didn’t even get a chance to complain — my neighbors called 311, Landmarks, etc. I just called the broker and told him that he was sparking an uprising (not so good for building relationships).
Lots trade in the Slope at $275 per bsf…when you can find them…this is a very recent data point…probably not yet in the databases just yet…but take my word on it.
Brownstoner, are you really just the mastermind of a plot to fan the flames of this crazy market? I’m amazed by your cavalier remarks about how $2mil for a townhouse so close to the BQE is “about right” – as a CH owner yourself, you clearly have a vested interest in this, and frankly, you are supported by ads from brokers. I’m really starting to question the conflict of interest! The market is overpriced right now, period, and blithely stating that prices are rational seems irresponsible now, as if talking up some new start-up just before the tech bubble exploded years ago.
“…$2 million. Sound about right?”
Cough…cough! Excuse me! I just visited the site and realized how close it is to the BQE. So, that would be a ‘no’.
Chubb estimated the replacement cost of our house to be almost $500 a foot, but that’s to recreate what’s there (moldings, parquet. etc.) We got the $325 number from an architect who’s built houses of this size from the ground up in Brooklyn.
you are idiots. $200 is just for hard costs. Soft costs are going to add up bringing the number to $300/$325. $200 for Hard is even a bit low considering the current costs of materials.
$300 to 325/sqft is incredibly high for new construction unless you are being ripped off by a GC
$200 psf is the general extension to existing building cost, not new building construction.