House of the Day: 274 Lafayette Avenue
This may be a first: Creating a name for the purpose of marketing a one-family brownstone! In this case, the four-story brownstone at 274 Lafayette Avenue has been christened “Indulge” for the express purpose of selling the house for a cool $2,325,000. The house, which was purchased in 2004 for $998,000, has undergone an extensive—and…
This may be a first: Creating a name for the purpose of marketing a one-family brownstone! In this case, the four-story brownstone at 274 Lafayette Avenue has been christened “Indulge” for the express purpose of selling the house for a cool $2,325,000. The house, which was purchased in 2004 for $998,000, has undergone an extensive—and quite attractive—renovation in the meantime. It’s also got some direct competition up the road at 298 Lafayette Avenue where another recently renovated four-story brownstone is on the market for $1,995,000.
274 Lafayette Avenue [Corcoran] GMAP P*Shark
These guys always name the houses. Do you remember “beautiful dream”? they have a much more reasonably priced listing on clermont.
daveinbedstuy: you gotta get outta the hood once in a while man.
Mort Zuckerman (on The MacLaughlin Group) said that he expected the longest, deepest recession since the Great Depression. I hate to believe it, but the cost of oil has barely touched us yet except for gasoline (which is finally where it should have been for the last decade). As the cost of products and services increases by double-digits, comsumer spending (wages have been stagnant for all by the top 1%) will crash and business will lay off or shut down. It’s scary out there…
This is a beautiful brownstone, and it is a real home not a chop-shop of tiny apartments.
The price seems astronomical though. Perhaps if it were located in Cobble Hill this price would make sense, no?
But over there by Pratt, dunno, not much over there in terms of upscale services. I could be wrong. I’m sure there are lots of hip-hop bars and other things catering to students and the very young, but are there services catering to a middle-aged millionaire and family -who I would imagine would be the buyer of such an estate?
2:32…I think these two places are overpriced for this neighborhood but yesterdays listings of Recent Sales prove that money is out there and is being spent on quality places in this price range. Most people that are paying $2MM +/- are not financing 90%, most likely not even 80% or 70%. These are not high prices compared even to Manhattan condos.
It’s a strange time to consider paying these prices unless this is your dream home and you don’t care what prices are going to be next year.
Real estate “bubbles” pop slowly — the metaphor is wrong — because buyers who overpaid can live in their tulips and (if death, divorce, disease and job changes don’t demand sale) need not realize their losses. Most people prefer paper losses to cash ones, so once prices drop, many potential sellers just hunker down, trapping themselves in their investments instead of moving on with life.
Similarly, all developers are optimists, so many will convince themselves that if they can just hold on a little longer, the buyers will reappear. Cutting prices, in contrast, would often mean default and admission of failure, something that isn’t very attractive to the developers or their banks (many of which are going to go under as soon as they have to admit that their loans aren’t being paid back). Much better to simply pretend that nothing is wrong and maybe the next surge will work.
On the other hand, given the speed of the bubble and its low volume of sales, most owners would still have plenty of equity even if prices dropped 50%. Once those folks accept that the market is really down, they’ll have relatively little problem selling for less than they hoped, especially since most of them will be putting most of their profits into a new house that has also declined in value.
Bottom line: housing declines start very slowly and often with a long period of flat prices. But this one may well accelerate once it gets going, and isn’t likely to stop until prices are back to trend, which would also put them more or less back in line with replacement cost and with rental
Hi Dave, I see you are trolling…
The implosion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was all the evidence I need. These institutions are real trouble and need about 75-100 billion to get things right. With out Fannie and Freddie all mortgages will come to a grinding halt.
You see Dave this Mutant Real Estate Bubble is dead. So you can continue with you juvenile taunts and name calling but this Fall will be very bad.
Now you can respond with something stupid Dave, I completely understand your mentality.
The What (Tick Tock Tick Tock..)
Someday this war is gonna end…
For $2.35MM, couldn’t they INDULGE us with more photos and a floorplan?
The What has a point. The escalation of prices in the market were based upon the availability of finacing, cheap or otherwise. Now that finacing has all but dried up, coupled with the fact that banks will not appraise at inflated prices, something has to give. I appreicate Brownstoner and his site, but the promotion of overinflated real estate in this market is simply not healthy. No hyperbole, just reason.