Third & Bond Blog

The bloggers from The Hudson Companies dust off their keyboards this week for an update on how sales at the Gowanus development are going…

We are enjoying another big moment in a journey of moments at Third + Bond: reaching 51% units in contract. Now all of our buyers with FannieMae and SONYMA loans can close. A half dozen buyers have been waiting for 51% so that they could fire up their lenders and attorneys. Closing these units means the buildings will be half full. The current occupants will have to stop wandering the halls in their pajamas.

When we broke ground on Third + Bond, we expected to make this announcement, well, long before now. Given the economy, we’ve revised our outlook to think this is still pretty good. In the three months since getting TCOs, we reached 51% sales. And we raised prices. We’ve sold from every floor plan studio, 1 beds, 2 beds, 3+ beds. As usual, we weren’t quite right in our betting on which unit would go first versus last. Hey, it doesn’t matter so long as there are buyers for each one.

The back half of sales is always easier than the first half. It’s like buyers need to have the comfort that someone else thought living there was a good idea. Spring has sprung for our buyers, as surely as the street trees have blossomed.

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www.thirdandbond.com

Our legal fine print: The complete offering terms are in an Offering Plan available from Sponsor. File No. CD080490. Sponsor: Hudson Third LLC, 826 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

When did you first see Third + Bond, and when did you know it was the place for you?
I saw it for the first time on StreetEasy and scheduled an appointment immediately. It was love at first sight with my unit. Of course I went to see other places after but ended up coming back!

What other places did you look at before settling on Third + Bond?
Many brownstones in the area and a few new construction projects in Williamsburg.

Where did you live before Third + Bond? Where are you from originally?
I used to live in a hi-rise condo “75 Wall” in the Financial District (Manhattan). I was born and raised in Venezuela but lived in Europe for several years before moving to NYC. (more…)

We are delighted to be an anchor for this free, fun-filled event. We love opportunities to bring people to our front door even if they don’t step foot inside. Bonus if they like green buildings and are likely to already live in brownstone Brooklyn! They’ll see how easy it is to get here and how gorgeous the building looks. Looks so gorgeous in fact that after riding her bicycle past, Gita Nandan, spearhead of the event and GreenHomeNYC board member, approached us about hosting. She had been looking at sites in Manhattan for the event but it was difficult to find one that worked. It was critical to be in the street, rather than a park, and to have nearby green buildings to feature. Third Street between Bond and Hoyt worked on every level. Even better, Alison is a GreenHomeNYC board member so Gita knew she had an advocate on the inside.

So, whether you’ve strolled by to check out our façade in person, sniffed around during an open house, or haven’t been by at all, you should come on over on Saturday. The weather forecast is mostly sunny with highs in the 60s. What better to do than hang around outside learning how to install and plant a green roof, tagging-along on an energy audit of a 100+ year old building, learning how to harvest rainwater, and even tour, that’s right, Third + Bond with a talk on sustainable furnishing by Pratt designers! There will be kid-friendly activities like solar car building and racing with SolarOne and crafting from old bike parts with Recycle-A-Bicycle which is also providing free bike valet.

There won’t be any tube socks or tie-dyed garments for sale but you can learn about NYC-based Green Depot’s new green cleaning products recently launched at Target stores, or talk to the guys at Foro Marble who provided the countertops for Third + Bond.
There will be food vendors like the Red Hook Lobster Pound, Rice and Blue Bottle. You can even drop off your old electronics, clothing or bikes for donation.

And you won’t want to miss the triumphant return of ‘The Jerko, the Gowanus Water Vacuum’ super-eco houseboat as it pulls into port at 2nd St after its maiden voyage on the canal. The Jerko’s captain will phone his personal brass band as he approaches the Third Street bridge so it can march down to greet him. Seriously.

It’ll be hard to top this event, marketing-wise. C’mon, a houseboat, brass band, and bike valet?? We might need to scale back to something a little simpler. Like shaving our logo into the neighborhood dogs. Here Fido!

Facebook: Third + Bond Twitter: Thirdbond
www.thirdandbond.com

Our legal fine print: The complete offering terms are in an Offering Plan available from Sponsor. File No. CD080490. Sponsor: Hudson Third LLC, 826 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Completion at C of O doesn’t satisfy Kiska. They want to consider the project complete, or more specifically substantially complete today. They look around the site and say, Everything’s finished except for the punch list and some inspections. Why are they so eager? A certificate of Substantial Completion is typically signed by the architect and handed over to the construction lender. The lender uses this form, as well as a big pile of other paperwork like final lien waivers, to justify releasing the remaining funds held in retention until job completion (aside from some amount held for punch list). Often Substantial Completion is also used to demarcate the end of the contractor’s responsibility for general conditions which includes security, utilities, daily project manager oversight, insurance, etc. Putting the brakes on overhead costs for the construction manager is highly desirable, especially when they have new projects where they want to move personnel.

Substantial Completion is defined as… (more…)

We love signing contracts, but customization is a tricky business. Over the course of our negotiations, we had to consider the costs of the additional construction and design work, as well as the impacts on the construction timeline and TCO sign-offs for the rest of the project. In the end it was fairly easy to decide that the benefit of selling two apartments with one stone more than outweighed the complications involved in combining them, and we now we have a signed contract for a second floor and a third floor two-bedroom as one combined duplex unit.

As detailed by a construction rider to the purchase contract, Hudson will customize the units by installing an internal staircase and demolishing one kitchen. The new unit will… (more…)

The guidelines for street trees are put out by the City Department of Parks and Recreation but our plan is first reviewed by the Department of Transportation when we submit our Builder’s Pavement Plan. (See Week 85.) We are required to plant 1 tree per 25′ or so of building frontage. But then there are distance limitations constraining how many of those trees can actually go into the ground. Each tree has to be 25′ from a streetlight, 30′ from a stop sign, 6′ from other traffic signs, 20′-40′ from other trees depending species, 5′ from a hydrant to edge of a tree pit, no where within a bus stop, etc. So while we were required to plant 10 trees, we could only fit in 4. What happens to the other 6?

There are two options… (more…)

This week, itchy or not, you’re getting an update on our construction loan. Back in Week 14 we talked about pursuing a $25 million construction loan and in Week 27 we talked about caps, collars, and swaps. A 100 or so weeks later, we have extended the due date of the loan now held by Wells Fargo. The construction loan originally closed in the hands of Wachovia with a term date this year. But given all of the fun writing this blog, we stretched out construction for as long as possible, thus bypassing the original term date. Now it’s Wells Fargo’s turn to have measured fun with the fees we produced to extend the loan. Their real fun isn’t until we pay back the entirety of the loan which could be as soon as this year or as late as 2012.

As part of the loan extension, Wells Fargo asked that we purchase a cap on our interest rate. A cap for them means… (more…)

T+B: Tell us a little about yourselves? How big is your family? What are your professions?
Charlie and I met the first week of freshman year of college and started dating about a week later back in 2001. We’ve been engaged since last year but it looks like we will wait on getting married until we can settle into our new home and save a bit more for a wedding. I am a Trusts and Estates attorney and Charlie is an HVAC design engineer. It’s the two of us and our two cats, Benjamin, a 7 year old Himalayan Persian, and Elvis, a 2 year old Ragdoll.

T+B: Benjamin and Elvis are going to love bird-watching out the back windows. What are your favorite things about the unit you have under contract?
There are so many things we love about our unit– the huge windows in the front with the view of the Kentile Floors sign, the open kitchen and vast counter space, the view from the bedrooms of the backyards and how quiet it will be to be away from the street, the central A/C, the quality of the appliances and fixtures, down to the button tiles in the second bathroom. We really think the reason we fell in love with the development and our unit is the attention to detail of the design team and contractors and their refusal to cut corners. We looked at so many places and saw time and again a willingness to sacrifice quality for speed and cost-savings-here you can tell that everyone involved with the project cared about the end result.

(more…)

Chances are: nope. How can we say that? Your home just made the transition from construction zone to residence in the last week and construction zones are dangerous places full of pointy stuff that scratches while homes are full of soft stuff like love and pillows. You certainly didn’t get up in the middle of the night to key your own dishwasher. But then again, you did have a moving company with a bunch of dollies running around the place. And there was that big crash when one of the kids was moving the fondue set and dropped it in the kitchen, fondue forks flying out like daggers. But maybe the Sponsor will just fix it…the Sponsor wants you to be happy, right?

Right. To that end… (more…)

As we approach the end of the development phase of Third + Bond, we’re spending more time focusing on the property management piece of the process, and we’re reminded of all the things not to do. There was the developer (well known) who called Hudson’s affiliated management company the week before buyers moved into his project, hoping for a proposal for property management services. There was the developer (also well known) who, having ceded control of management to a company selected by residents, got into a litigious dispute of finger pointing with the condo regarding whether the systems were defective or improperly maintained. Or the developer (really well known) who didn’t hire a property manager for the first 4 months of occupancy. (In case it’s not obvious, we aren’t the developer in any of these instances.)

Our approach is… (more…)

The Temporary Certificate of Occupancy (TCO) is necessary to live in the units legally. Few lenders will close on a unit that is not legally inhabitable yet, not to mention that most have pre-sale requirements. We are over 20% sold now, so closing in on 30% sold. Thirty-percent is the magic number for FHA closings to start. Many if not most of our buyers are getting FHA loans. We do have a few buyers paying all cash but expect they’ll want to wait until TCO to close as well.

Having a TCO means… (more…)

As per the Times article, we are 20% sold. The crucial percentage was 15% because that allows us to have the condo plan declared effective. Now we are just waiting on TCO to start closing units for those buyers who are paying all cash or whose lenders don’t have a pre-sale requirement… (more…)

In the ten or so weeks that Third + Bond has been on Facebook, we’ve gained 183 friends, fans or likes, depending on today’s Facebook nomenclature. That’s about 18 a week, which is not far off from the number of weekly visitors to the physical site. We see upwards of 360 visitors per week to the page. True to our expectations, some of our fans are no-quotes-needed friends of people involved in the project, like Alison’s mom. The majority though are people we don’t know and that’s pretty interesting.

We see the Facebook page as another opportunity to capture and keep the interest of potential buyers or the pals of potential buyers. It’s push marketing in that once you like us, we can pop onto your screen whenever we like and grab your attention. In contrast, while you can bookmark our website, we can’t contact you at will. We can’t remind you to check out our latest news, we can only hope you come back to visit once in awhile.

We’ve also found that Facebook… (more…)