Open House Picks: Townhouses

304 Greene Avenue is in bs, i dont like hte block at all with the school so near.

314 Carlton is between Lafayette Ave and Dekalb, accross from the school and the playground. Not a location I would want, but everyone has different criteria for location.

I’ve been in the Ditmas Park house. It’s clean and spacious with a few details. The top floor loft would make a good office or playroom, as would the particularly nice finished basement. The rest of the house is pretty blank, not too much original detail left, but clean and decent. Not in the same league with the two gems Mary Kay’s got listed in PPS. Although this house was probably pretty grand in its day and the new shingle job )rather than cheap siding) is greatly appreciated by the neighborhood, as this house is in DPW which isn’t landmarked and all kinds of horrors can still happen there.

Danielle DiMartino at the Dallas News. “So we know the housing market is melting down. What we don’t know is when it will stop. ‘The housing experience of 1999-2005 was a classic case, in our opinion, of how a boom (1999-2001) turns into a mania (2002-2003) and ultimately morphs into a bubble (2004-2005),’ Merrill Lynch chief economist David Rosenberg wrote in a recent report.”

“‘Unwinding the excesses of the past six years will undoubtedly take time, but the adjustment won’t likely be any less painful, and in the process will act as a lingering constraint on confidence and spending,’ he said.”

From New York Magazine. “It’s been a funny sort of summer in the real-estate world, as the July and August doldrums have felt less like the usual quiet and more like the beginning of something bad.”

“Ask broker Lisa Wong, who admits to a little survivor guilt. Though she’s been able to buy and sell properties for a steady trickle of clients—a big difference from the deluge a year or two ago, she does admit—many of her colleagues have found themselves with more time on their hands to agonize over the flattening market. Will it get better? Or worse? ‘I’ve heard that it’s dead,’ she says.”

“Many agents say it’s September that’s make-or-break time for them. ‘It’s a litmus test for what the rest of the year will be like,’ says Christopher Mathieson, managing partner at JC DeNiro. ‘This one’s really important because we want to see if the market’s going to continue to plateau.’”

“A recent Halstead Property report showed that prices dipped 12 percent from June to July this summer; brokers say August was even more sedate. To make deals stick, ‘you have to work two or three times harder,’ says Wong. ‘You’re getting lowball offers and calls you’d never get before. For something worth $1.9 million, you’ll get an offer for $1.6, something crazy.’”