Co-op of the Day: 420 12th Street 2BR

I know someone who lives in that building who has major buyers remorse and would love to get out but since the market crashed he’s sticking around for a bit. The place is EXTREMELY loud. The walls are thin and you can hear everything that your neighbors are doing. Sometimes the noise is just kids running around but other times it is much more than that. The places are also very shoddily constructed as whoever developed them in the 1980s or whenever could care less about the quality of materials used etc. And what the poster said about the cold is more than true. From what I heard it is like living outside in the winter and the costs to heat the place are outrageous.

My friend has a coop in that building and I tell you in the winter, it is COLD. His apartment would sometimes drop to the 50s with the drafts and the leakage of energy from poorly pointed exposed bricks. He lives with his girlfriend on the UES during the week and on the weekend he/they go there. She never wants to go in the dead of winter because she doesn’t want to freeze. He also says that kids running up and down the hallway are a pain in the ass.

Although looking more closely now–as a more experienced house hunter–I do feel like the living room is a tad on the smalle size, it feels a little short on closet space (at least according to the floor plan), and doesn’t seem like there’s laundry.

But still a great place.

We bought a two bedroom there (very similar to the listing here, except no balcony)in ’86 for somewhere around $150k and sold in ’96 for just about the same amount. We were not the first owners and I seem to remember that the people we bought from had been there 3 or 4 years so a conversion in the early 80s sounds about right. There was a time during our ownership when similar units were going for the high 200’s but the real estate turndown of the late 80s and early 90s took care of that “appreciation”. Kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it, how an event so comparitively recent could fail to inform those financial institutions that bet our money on the belief that real estate prices would never fall? Within a couple of months of our selling there, prices started to rise again apace which was fine with us because we had bought a townhouse at the market bottom at the same time as we sold.

The Ansonia is an absolutely wonderful place for young kids and the courtyard facilitates much easier interaction with your neighbors than one experiences in the typical co-op. Of course that also means that if there are folks with whom you don’t get along, avoiding them is not easy; it’s a two-edged sword.

“Broker babble!”
I’ll have to remember that phrase, Ringo.