Strong Showing for 49 Rutland Road
Take that, market bears! Remember 49 Rutland Road?
Take that, market bears! Remember 49 Rutland Road? The four-story brick and limestone house hit the market last November with an asking price of $1,450,000. It popped up recently as being in contract on Brown Harris Stevens. The contract price, we hear, is $1,425,000. It took a few months, but that sounds like a pretty strong vote of confidence in the townhouse market to us. Or at least for PLG!
HOTD: 49 Rutland Road [Brownstoner] GMAP P*Shark
49 Rutland Road [Brown Harris Stevens]
12:47, we looked at a large house in prime Ditmas for 450K which needed aprox 100K in work and is now worth at least 1.5, (3 times what we would have paid). We also looked at a house in Clinton Hill for 400k. Probably needed 200K in work, but now worth 2M (over 3 times what we would have invested). Some people really hit the lottery!
“It’s doubled, which is cool, but only a fraction of what we would have made if we bought elsewhere.”
Hi, new commenter here.
You debunk the 4x returns argument with actual numbers, so far so good, but then you perpetuate the same myths regarding elsewhere.
Can you provide comps to prove that it would have been a multiple of what you made, elsewhere?
Remember that cost of “elsewhere” was also a lot more back then, as they are now.
It’s not like someone spent a total of $500k and are now sitting in a $2MM house.
More like they spent $800k, put another $200k into it, and are now sitting in a ~$2MM house.
Would love to see actual numbers, but I think that all anyone anywhere is looking at since 1999 is double the original value. (which is great..)
It’s not like other neighborhoods were selling for same as yours and then jumped, or else you would have picked a house in one of those places (as Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope, Cobble Hill etc were pretty darn nice in 1999).
No?
“Anybody who bought in PLG in 1999 is happy as a clam. Their house is worth 3 or 4 or 5 times what they paid for it, even in the current soft market.”
Where do you get that?? We bought for 395K. We spent 150K renovating it, putting our investment at 550K. It is now worth 1M to a max of 1.2M. It’s doubled, which is cool, but only a fraction of what we would have made if we bought elsewhere. And that answers the other question of why we haven’t moved–can’t afford to buy anywhere!!
All of the recent arrivals are still hopeful. That’s sweet. But in 5 years you’ll be singing a different tune. The issues go far beyond amenities and far harder to change.
We chose PLG and don’t regret it and are staying too, 10:56. The person at 10:23 just expresses many residents’ frustration that the amenities have changed very slowly and much more slowly than some in the community said they would. But there’s a very clear reason 10:23 did not see the changes in amenities before.
The community and the landlords were not very organized or effective before about attracting new businesses. Hopefully that’s changing. But mostly because the demographics of the renters needed to change, not just the one-family houses in the area. Young singles are the ones to eat out and drink out all the time. Not families. Delivery is not the big cash cow for restaurants, liquor is.
Some here will point out some buildings are still RC on Flatbush. But low-income people need to live somewhere, and many of these residents are med students, nurses and hospital workers from nearby very large Kings Cty hospital & med school, or are teachers or civil servants and are decent people. Not everybody makes loads of money, even if they are educated and work hard.
There are plenty other buildings for new renters to come into the community and that change has been huge. We are able to see it over the period of only one year since coming here. Also there are at least 3 new condos being built (for better or for worse depending on folks’ perspectives) on the park and the tall on on Lincoln. So anyway, long post short, if people sound more hopeful now it’s because of changes in the non-brownstone residents, bringing more demographics and economic diversity to the consumers here.
Anybody who bought in PLG in 1999 is happy as a clam.
Their house is worth 3 or 4 or 5 times what they paid for it, even in the current soft market.
10:23, I live in PLG.
Please tell me what these huge issues are?
I moved in recently and have noticed positive changes just in the last few months.
10:23, You seem to have stayed in PLG. I wonder why????
“PLG is today what Prospect Heights was in 1997. Within 5-10 years, these PLG rowhouses will be the envy of everyone who is presently hating on this area.”
That is EXACTLY what everyone said when we almost bought there in 1999!!! Prices there were rising and lots of people were moving in from the Slope and everyone said that in 5 years it would be just like Park Slope. Now it is 9 years later–Park Slope has dramatically changed, as has most of brownstone Brooklyn. But PLG has not really changed at all, except for a coffee house and a restaurant. The “issues” in PLG are huge and simply will not change any time soon.
Why don’t we just rename this blog WHITESTONER!
I literally read it, mostly, to see what sort of veiled and not so veiled racist drivel surfaces in the name of, I guess, “real estate”–does anybody remember that this country was founded on “real” estate-i.e., stolen land, and people who were considered property–and that this mentality has continued to fuel the American “way?” Yes, those are historical tendencies, although any reasonable American historian at a major research university would agree–Howard Zinn just cribbed from Edmund Morgan, hardly a radical–
But what about this: NYC is now the MOST segregated city in the entire United States.
Is this accidental?
“JC is a cesspool…crime is out of control there”
Just an exercise: rewrite that sentence between 1900-1950, and it would be about Jews, Italians, or the Irish.
Rewrite it now, and its about blacks and Latinos.
A “cesspool?” I’ve lived in JC before, and I have a friend who lives there–she’s heavily involved in local activism–she’s white, btw, an Ivy League grad, and her very wealthy parents have paid her mortgage. Jersey City is what NYC used to be–people of all races, hanging out, from wealthy to poor, etc. Parts of the city have higher crime, but my bike was stolen by the WHITE drug-dealing kids of a BROWNSTONE OWNER in Park Slope, where I live, last week.
The only other crime I’ve experienced in Brooklyn was also in the Slope: a white hipster-looking dude took my Ibook when my head was turned, then walked down the street with it. I jumped up and confronted him: he gave it back. In Jersey City, when I lived there, I dropped my wallet: somebody came running after me to give it back.
These aren’t statistics, they’re human stories.
If this really is about creating Whitestoners, then let’s just call it that–but stop making these snide, thinly veiled (really not very veiled) racist comments and then pretending its “just reality.” Umm, yeah, if you’re Lyndon LaRouche.