150 Bond Finally Sells—For a Loss
The sale of 150 Bond Street, which was a House of the Day a number of times, was recorded in public records yesterday. The price: $1,400,000. The property, which was pitched as a gutted blank slate that would allow its new owner to “build your dream house in Boerum Hill,” first hit the market asking…
The sale of 150 Bond Street, which was a House of the Day a number of times, was recorded in public records yesterday. The price: $1,400,000. The property, which was pitched as a gutted blank slate that would allow its new owner to “build your dream house in Boerum Hill,” first hit the market asking $2,495,000 in March ’08. The price was cut several times until it was asking $1,595,000 this summer. The seller purchased it for $1,725,000 in September ’07. This one seems like it was a victim of unrealistic pricing from the get-go and a down market in which fixer-uppers are a tough sell.
House of the Day: 150 Bond Street Revisited GMAP P*Shark
Open House Picks: Price Cut Edition [Brownstoner]
Houses of the Day: A Couple of Price Cuts [Brownstoner]
House of the Day: 150 Bond Street [Brownstoner]
150 Bond Price History [StreetEasy]
There’s nothing wrong with flippers per se. If all you do is get a house, whip it into marketable and habitable shape, and sell it at a profit, there no problem. They don’t inflate the market and don’t make people pay what they wouldn’t otherwise pay.
Flippers get their bad rep, and to some extent deservedly so, because in many cases they cut legal and ethical corners to get there. Sheetrock and paint is the answer to everything — rotten joists, unsafe wiring, termites, leaks, mold, you name it. Sell the house and pocket the money before the paint dries and the water damage starts to peak through 1.5 coats of BM flat. There was enough of that going around to give all flipeprs in brownstone Brooklyn a bad name.
But the act of flipping, without more, is harmless.
Chicken, I disagree. I think there is a greater sympathy on this board felt towards flippers, because there are more homeowners. None of the families that got forced out onto the streets because of foreclosure are able to come on here. They are too busy shuttling their kids from one group home to another and moreover, they don’t have steady internet access. Starbucks only allows you to log on for one hour at a time. (I know, because I was once homeless)
Meanwhile, goldman sachs employees elbow pregnant women to the side to get in front of the line for swine flu vaccine.
“it’s a tough crowd that frowns on lunch breaks.”
LOL
Yes, if you can’t post through lunch, best not to login before that.
Yes, there certainly ought to be a law against flipping and making money.
There should also be laws against anyone trying to better themselves by striving for a promotion, working harder, playing the lotto, looking for a better paying job, and expecting a raise at anypoint in their careers.
hearty apologies to all those waiting for my formal acknowledgement of stevieb’s googling skills. it’s a tough crowd that frowns on lunch breaks.
so you’ve now found 2 folks who made serious serious money and 3 more one hit wonders that called the crisis. congratulations and i hereby acknowledge you stevieb. you won the rhetorical question session. hear! hear!
but you know what? let’s do some math. take those folks and divide by the rest of the idiots long on real estate (approx 75 mio). that works out to 1 in 15 million or the same odds of winning the ny lotto if you buy 3 tickets.
virtually no one wins the lotto even though inevitably someone does.
DIBS, I agree that the evidence points to an original intention of staying there so it’s the sale shortly after that marks it out as a flip to me.
Flips and forced sales are not mutually exclusive and the extreme leverage and seat-of-the-pants financing that often accompanies it means that unsuccessful flips end up being forced sales anyway.
I guess the overriding issue is a general negative view towards flippers, which I disagree with.
chicken, given all the permits, the language of them and the intent to convrt to a one family, do you not agree that the original intent was to own this as a home, probably for a long time?
The fact that the owner may have lost his job or a lot of money in the market or both throws a wrench into this that causes it to be a forced sale. that is not what MOST people view as a flip, but a forced sale.
The only reason people are even bringing it up was because he tried (blatantly) to make an (enormous) profit once all the plans fell through and he was forced to sell.
I suspect that, given the unkown circumsatnces, even if he made a profit on this house he still might be in dire financial straits.
I would define a flipper as someone who buys a property and then sells it relatively soon after in the hopes of making a profit.
Renovation does not have to take place for it to be a flip. I bought a house a few years back that I expected to be subject to a compulsory purchase order by the local authority to turn the area into a shopping centre. I didn’t do anything to the property apart from a tidy up and a lick of paint because I didn’t think it would justify itself in any higher price that would be offered.
So, to me, a flip can only be determined after the fact. If someone buys a house with the intention of flipping it but then decides to live in it for 20 years then that is not a flip. If someone buys a house with the intention to live in it for 20 years but then decides to put it on the market after 1 then that (to me) is a flip.
So (to me) the biggest area of subjectivity is how long the property needs to be owned in order for it not to be a flip.
In this instance, it looks to me like a flip.
DIBS, I am not looking for Antidope to admit that he is wrong necessarily, but for him to give me some props for the hours that I spent googling and that took time away from my day job as a writer. 🙁 sigh…… Is that too much to ask for???