Is It Bottom-Feeding Time Yet?
Have any readers been out there looking to buy properties in fringe areas with desperate sellers? How about working directly with banks to take distressed properties off their hands? This Bushwick listing on Craigslist caught our eye. The bank owns it and is asking $349,000. Our guess is that it’ll end up going for a…
Have any readers been out there looking to buy properties in fringe areas with desperate sellers? How about working directly with banks to take distressed properties off their hands? This Bushwick listing on Craigslist caught our eye. The bank owns it and is asking $349,000. Our guess is that it’ll end up going for a lot less, given its condition, but we don’t have a sense of where the real bottom of the market is. Why not $200,000? Or $100,000? Thoughts?
$349000 Bank Owned 2 Family [Craigslist]
BRG – our budget is over 1 mil and we’re looking in prime areas only, or fringes of them i.e. south (or south south) slope. But no, I don’t think it’s bottom feeding time yet – not even close.
Well, I don’t find today gorgeous at all. I find it annoying, and I’m glad there will only be a few days like it in NYC all year. But to each their own.
Syracuse is dirt cheap for a reason, though. I have tons of friends and family still there, and I visit often, but I wouldn’t buy there. The city’s economy has been going through a 20-plus year depression with no end in sight, most of the area’s industry has moved away, and they’re counting on tourism dollars from a super-mall that may or may not ever get built to fix a large chunk of their problems. Percentage-wise, the murder rate is pretty high, and the area has fairly large swaths of bad neighborhoods.
Outside of the city proper, there has been a huge explosion of developments of the exact kind of bigger-than-you-really-need, more-expensive-than-you-can-really-afford housing that is a huge part of this current financial crisis. I should know: I grew up in one.
And the school systems are dramatically overrated. New York State’s insane continued adherence to the Regents system is a huge problem.
SU’s a pretty good school though, so that’s something.
Buffalo and Rochester, while both bigger than Syracuse and somewhat better off economically, suffer from many similar problems.
All these upstate cities (Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany) have very vibrant and cool neighborhoods and are dirt cheap. The Times recently profiled a couple from NYC who bought an old Victorian in a great Buffalo neighborhood for 279K. Same house in in Brooklyn? Easy over 1M. And for 100K, you can get a reasonable house in a very safe neighborhood.
As for the cold, get a sweater. The weather today in NYC is probably a typical Buffalo winter day. And despite the fake panic by the local TV weathermen to jack up the ratings, I think today is gorgeous.
That facade could be in Park Slope South.
Take it from someone who lived in Buffalo for a year: do not live in Buffalo. It is cold, cold, cold. Cold. Did I mention it’s cold? Because it’s cold.
And I grew up in Syracuse … so it’s not like I don’t know cold. Buffalo, my friends, is cold.
Oops, sorry, Jimmy Legs.
I absolutely love it. However, I am living in a tiny corner that is safe, with many excellent restaurants, wonderful people, and great subway access. Also, my taste tends to run to areas like this, mostly recent Mexican immigrants with a tiny smattering of artists opening new businesses — and that’s entirely subjective and I realize not at all what everyone is looking for or needs in a neighborhood. Furthermore, there is virtually nothing to rent or buy in the tiny corner I live in. Other areas of Bushwick are different, and I’m really not qualified to opine on them.
Wine Lover, this is a two family. It’s 20×45 according to Property Shark. Unless previous owners reconfigured it, it’s almost certainly got a top-floor rental apartment with five to six rooms (three bedrooms), an owner’s apt on the first floor with two bedrooms, and a basement/celler that is meant for storage but not living. An unfortunate previous renovation seems to have filled in the area under the porch and covered over the windows in the English basement.
There’s a reason you don’t know anything about Buffalo. As the song goes…”shuffle off…”
are there really lots of artists in buffalo? are houses really that cheap there? i dont know anything about buffalo, what’s it like
*rob*