House of the Day: 193 Washington Park
While the owners of 204 Washington Park try to get close to $3 million for their five-story brownstone, a 25-footer up the block at 193 Washington Park just hit the market with a price tag of $3,875,000. (Another comp: The 4,400-square-foot, immaculately renovated house at 181 Washington Park sold last spring for $3,037,500.) Before you…

While the owners of 204 Washington Park try to get close to $3 million for their five-story brownstone, a 25-footer up the block at 193 Washington Park just hit the market with a price tag of $3,875,000. (Another comp: The 4,400-square-foot, immaculately renovated house at 181 Washington Park sold last spring for $3,037,500.) Before you completely write off the owners as lunatics, consider that it is a solid 6,500 square feet. That said, it’s been in the same hands for over 25 years and, while certainly in decent shape and full of charm, it’s not like somebody just dumped a million bucks into the place. As much as we love the location, we have a hard time seeing how a family buyer would step up at this price. The only possibility would be for a conversion and event that, with a pre-conversion price of about $500 a foot, seems pretty skinny.
193 Washington Park [Corcoran] GMAP P*Shark
This house will go down the road of 338 Clinton Avenue–see HOTD (LAST YEAR!!) http://bstoner.wpengine.com/brownstoner/archives/2006/11/house_of_the_da_221.php
The guy who owns the “mansion” at 338 Clinton also owns the house next door (just like the owner of this house). It’s been listed for over a year and was only recently reduced $500K (from $3.2 original listing price), yet no takers yet. Not even a developer. I guess these guys just don’t really need to sell and are willing to test the waters at completely insane prices. It will become another white elephant. There are too many properties on the market in Fort Greene that are listed for ridiculous sums compared to recent sales.
A celebrity lived in the house (Tony). That certainly raises the value!
Drew,
Agreed. 2:34 PM here. 2:22 PM’s fingers should melt off when he even thinks of attempting to type such clap:
“three pont what?!?!?!
for fort blacke?”
A little trivia:
Tony from the ‘how to replace a window’ video last week used to live in this building.
Also, the man that owns 193 also owns 194 – he bought them for DIRT CHEAP in the 70’s…low five figures from what I’ve heard!!! Very smart man.
Did an adult human being actually type “fort black”??? I guess it’s their right to be openly racist, but that’s not even approaching clever. In gfact, that has to be the lamest racist remark I’ve ever read, and coming from a brownstoner post, that’s saying a lot.
And what projects are casting a shadow on this place? The sparsely-inhabited, low-rise Walt Whitmans down the hill?
Thank you 5:18 for some reasoned explanations. I like to think the pressure on the FG market, aside from the incredible location, is due to the quaintness of the streetscapes…but I’m a romanticist.
I have to wonder if as much of the houseing stock will be coverted to income properties as you seem to predict…non-owner occupied. It seems to me there has been an influx of 30-something relative-wealth moving in and taking over whole houses as single-family or keep the houses with that one garden-level income apartment as it was before. Have a lot of houses been converted recently?
FG/TGL
he was too busy…scoring…
wink wink.
hmmm… how come Minsky didn’t score this listing?
keep in mind that many of these beautiful brownstones are really income-producing properties. Rents in Fort Greene, because of the neigihborhoods convenience to Manhattan, are very, very high. Looking at this building as a 4-unit rental with 4 market-rate apartments is what makes the price even remotely feasible. This is why house-hunting in Brooklyn sucks. These properties can be used as apartment buildings or converted to condos, there are no prohibitions in the city like there are in the nicer towns in the burbs. It is crazy to compete with landlords and developers looking for income-producing property when all you are looking for is a family home. Fort Greene home ownership is off limits to all but the very wealthiest in for this reason. Pretty soon there will be very few single and two-familty brownstones left in these blocks. the economic pressures are too great.