192 columbia heights brooklyn heights 82014

The creme de la creme of Brooklyn listings is clotted. The handful of Brooklyn properties at the very top of the market, asking between $10,000,000 and $16,000,000 and sometimes more, aren’t moving. There’s a multi-million-dollar gap between asking and closing prices at the tippy top of the Brooklyn market.

The Real Deal took a look at the top 10 Brooklyn listing prices and the top 10 Brooklyn closed sales, and found a discrepancy. Since 70 Willow Place — where Truman Capote famously rented — closed for $12,500,000 in 2012, several higher priced properties have failed to sell, and it remains the borough record.

Said the paper:

The priciest listings ranged from a $14 million Park Slope townhouse to the $32 million One Brooklyn Bridge Park penthouse. Interestingly, the most expensive closed sales were priced far lower, ranging from a $5.8 million Brooklyn Heights townhouse to an $8.7 million townhouse at 12 College Place in the same neighborhood.

The luxury market in Brooklyn is still nowhere near Manhattan’s, where a 5th Avenue co-op recently set a record when it sold for $70,000,000. The average luxury sales price in Manhattan is $7,250,000 — about the same as a townhouse in Brooklyn Heights, one of the borough’s oldest and priciest nabes.

Yet luxury market prices here are climbing just as much as the rest of the market. In the second quarter, the average price for luxury sales was up 32.6 percent from the same period the year earlier, to $2,530,000. “In addition, sources say the gap in price between the borough’s most expensive listings and closed sales is poised to narrow, especially as a raft of new luxury construction comes to the market,” said the story.

Some notable listings that have been on the market for more than six months (our own list, not The Real Deal’s):
*192 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights, a huge Italianate brownstone with sweeping views of the river (pictured above). Asking $16,000,000.
*646 2nd Street, former home of Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, now asking $13,000,000, down from $14,500,000.
*105 8th Avenue, the Tracy Mansion in Park Slope that used to be a school, now asking $13,000,000, down from $25,000,000.

What do you think is holding back these sales?

Brooklyn’s Big Buys: The Borough’s Priciest Listings and Sales [TRD]


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