House of the Day: 10% Off at 450 8th Street
After four weeks on the market, 450 8th Street in Park Slope just got a haircut on the order of 10 percent. The four-story, two-family house has nice bones and looks to be in decent but not perfect condition. Despite some very nice details like original wood paneling and parquet floors that you’d expect from…
After four weeks on the market, 450 8th Street in Park Slope just got a haircut on the order of 10 percent. The four-story, two-family house has nice bones and looks to be in decent but not perfect condition. Despite some very nice details like original wood paneling and parquet floors that you’d expect from a brownstone in this location, there’s a slight shabbiness to the photos (get that a/c out of the window!) that may account in part for why this place didn’t move at $2.2 million. We suspect at its new price of $1,990,000, it should attract some real interest.
450 8th Street [Corcoran] GMAP P*Shark
450 8th Street Reduced [Natefind]
When people with money moved from the cities to the suburbs, they were despised for it. Now that people with money choose to stay in the city, they’re despised for that too. I guess the only honorable thing they can do is give their money away to all the rest of us, and then kill themselves.
Wife and me are both junior VPs in Investment Banks. Together we make 400k a year and pay seems to be rising going forward.
It is nonsense that every VP in IB makes 500k+. VP is not VP. Big difference if you are a VP in trading or in M&A or middle office or in technology.
The pay is extremely tilted to MD and the higher up. I would really like to know the median and not the average pay on Wall St. I wouldn’t be suprised if the median is much less than the quoted 290k average.
Even if 400k after taxes and other expenses, we would be able to carry maybe up to 6k in mortgage NOW, but we would need to able to carry it for at least the next 10years. The next hic-up on Wall St will happen, but nobody knows when. It would dangerous in my eyes to do this it this point. Wall St is a very volatile place.
“Smarter? No. The smartest are the ones who do work that makes them happy and manage to become homeowners along the way whether they’re making megabucks or not.”
Amen. NYC has lost sight of this (although I think the point about becoming a homeowner is a personal choice, and will not make one happy just in itself – it’s the doing what you love that will)
I was able to afford my place by not spending any money on clothes or food. I weigh only 23lbs and dress in a barrel but I do have my down payment ready for when the prices drop.
“Assume your average VP makes $500K+. ”
Not true for all Wall Street. At my company VP’s don’t make anything like that. It’s the Senior VP’s or Directors that are making that much, or more.
^^^^ agree
You need to be a favored VP or better at a bulge bracket firm, of which there are only six, AND get the bonuses you’re shooting for to clear 500k before taxes
This market is built up by its own bootstraps, not by people who can burn $12k+ per month before tax on mortgage, taxes and expenses.
For whatever it’s worth, my experience in Clinton Hill didn’t relate to the “young/younger” theory. For many, many years after I bought, none of my friends would visit, and no cabbies would come here, due primarily to CH’s unjustified bad rap…my old apt in Manhattan was in an area with a lot more drugs and crime, but for some reason my contemporaries considered it a more acceptable place to live, and warned me at every opportunity that I’d be murdered very soon. So I joined the local block assn and made new friends, many of whom were artists who’d graduated from Pratt long before I moved here, liked the area, and stuck around. The best investment is to migrate BEFORE the migration. Nobody would mistake me for a hipster now, but on the other hand, my mortgage is paid off. Win a few, lose a few…
We’re on our 2nd place, a coop purchased for 625K in a good neighborhood with a good public school (we just bought in early 06). The school thing is important to us because we have a young child, and I’m not sure we’ll ever afford a brownstone in our neighborhood. We make 225K combined, so you think we’d be able to figure it out, but I just can’t see us having enough DP to bring the mortgage down to a comfortable level. Makes me sad, but we’d rather have the neighborhood and the strong schools than the house (for now).
Being “artistic” is hardly the descriptive underlying reason for the migration path in my observations. It’s more where the “young”/”younger” people are moving to… i.e. graduate from hs, college, find your friends got a “cheap” place “where ever”, they said to come join them, they gather together after work/weekends, local people noticed something different, friends talk to other friends, those friends talk to their still in school/out of state, they come & join in, and then all hell breaks with “die hipsters, die!”
Smarter? No. The smartest are the ones who do work that makes them happy and manage to become homeowners along the way whether they’re making megabucks or not. Like the artistic types who recognized affordable beauty when they saw it and bought when the nabe wasn’t fashionable or pricey – and had their houses all fixed up and paid off by the time Wall Street discovered Brooklyn. To the artistic types still looking: find an area with decent public transportation where none of your friends want to live, buy what you can afford, and wait for Wall Street to catch up with you.