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]
To anon 12:19, I’ve often wondered about that myself. I really must have gone into the wrong fields of work, because there must be a massive amount of people making big bucks out there, as evidenced by the endless parade of luxury new construction and multi-million dollar brownstones stretching from Bay Ridge to Bed Stuy, and everywhere in between. Is EVERYONE working on Wall Street? Or doctors, lawyers? Wall St. must be bigger (and easier) than I always thought it was, is it too late to cross over to the dark side? A million dollar house is somewhere around an $8K mortgage a month. I’m sorry, I’m just a middle aged artist type, but that’s a lot of money to me, and that’s the cheap end of the spectrum. I wish I could afford that, but it certainly isn’t happening now. Ah, well.
I haven’t seen the house. However the house can’t drop by too much from the $1.99MM level. There are buyers there evenif it needs work.
In resposne to the first poster, the average Wall Street salary was about $290K in 2005 and is expected to increase 15% this year. That average includes CEOs down to secrataries. Assume your average VP makes $500K+. Standard old day forumula was to buy a house = to 4.0x your salary. 4 * $500K = $2.0 million.
What, no discount for the condition of the house?
I think that the house was probably listed too high at $2.2MM. The house is only 17 feet X 45 feet, so it was slighly more than 3000 square feet. At $2.2MM, they were asking about $720 per square foot. That’s too much for 8th street.
At $1.99MM, the house is now priced at $650 per square foot. That’s more reasonable. It should sell around that price.
Adding on to Anon 12:50’s comments – DH and I saw both 452 and 450 a few weeks ago. 452 was move-in condition, needing only a paint job. Down the road you’d redo the kitchen and maybe the baths but it was in great shape. The broker was talking out of both sides of her mouth that day, telling us there was “interest” in the property AND then in the next breath saying the the seller chose to drop the price from $2.2M to $1.99M to show that she was a motivated seller. Um, if there’s interest, why drop your price? We were not surprised, though, that it went to contract quickly after the price drop.
Now 450 – ‘shabby’ hardly begins to describe it. I’d need a structural engineer to crawl around the place before I was certain that the bones were good. The kitchen is a nightmare – the ‘country pine’ cabinets are raw wood, complete with dust, knotholes and splinters inside. The basement is dank. The whole place has cracked, dirty or peeling paint, exposed radiators and pipes and just feels grubby. The broker claimed the staircase had been fixed of its noted lean but the work wasn’t great, and some of the upstairs rooms had spanking’ new cheap wood flooring placed atop the old flooring, which led to a weird difference in floor height when you stepped over the doorjamb. To top it off, both bathrooms upstairs are redone in true bordello/Vegas style.
The pricing of 452 didn’t help this property, but if that went to contract in the mid $1.9s, this baby is still way way overpriced.
If the broker sets the price, yes blame the broker. For the person who said they are not a broker, there are comparable sales figures that brokers can look at. You just know when a house is grossly overpriced like this one. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure it out. I know brokers who don’t take listings because they are overpriced and I have to agree, most go to Corcoran and are terribly disappointed.
Totally agree with anon 1:14.
This house is horrific for close to 2mm bucks. i think they need another 10-20% easy. if these pics are best pics… just imagine the rest.