The Real Deal: A Dose of Reality for Crown Heights Market
Citing some of the discussions on this blog, real estate mag The Real Deal puts the Crown Heights market in its place this month with an article entitled, “Sellers Swallowing Their Pride in Crown Heights.” While not dismissing the nabe’s merits, the basic thesis is that the market got ahead of itself and there’re are…
Citing some of the discussions on this blog, real estate mag The Real Deal puts the Crown Heights market in its place this month with an article entitled, “Sellers Swallowing Their Pride in Crown Heights.” While not dismissing the nabe’s merits, the basic thesis is that the market got ahead of itself and there’re are lots of homeowners with a deluded sense of what their places are worth. (Yesterday’s HOTD is further proof of that phenomenon.) Several brokers are surprisingly frank about clients who insisted on slapping ridiculous prices on their houses, only to have them languish on the market. Here’s a great anecdote:
Kevin McNeill, a senior vice president at Corcoran, is all too familiar with this phenomenon. He points to a three-story townhouse he helped put on the market for $1.2 million back in June. “It was overpriced, but her next-door neighbor had listed at $1.4 million,” says McNeill. “Hers was similar [to her neighbor’s], and when she saw $1.4 million it was hard to talk her off the ledge.” For two months the home languished. Then in August the seller agreed to drop the price by about $100,000, but still it sat. It wasn’t until McNeill convinced her to lower the price below $1 million that the house sold. “The minute we brought it to $995,000, we sold it within days,” says McNeill. “We closed at $960,000.”
The implicit conclusion of the article, which we’d agree with, seems to be that in the new, post-subprime paradigm, $1 million is a huge psychological barrier in Crown Heights, as it is for most of Bed Stuy. But as Corcoran’s McNeill says, “When people talk about price reductions in these neighborhoods, it’s not about the market, it’s about improper pricing.”
Sellers Swallowing Their Pride in Crown Heights [The Real Deal]
Photo by gkjarvis
These houses seem harmless enough.
Check out this site http://www.shopbedstuy.com and we are going to team up with the many good businesses in CH as the flight from the congestion of AY accelerates in the fall of ’08. CH is one stop on the LIRR from AY but far enough to still find parking. Start your fights for permit only parking FG, PH and PS. What you gonna do when 20,000 visitors run wild on you?
low-income housing does not a high crime rate explain.
There are low-income asian and Polish and neighborhoods in NY with low crime rates.
12:24…This is a photo of Carroll Street, near New York Ave.
A ClintinHillLaday
The article seems reasonable. Crown Heights does offer fantastic architecture and a nice residential feel, but in terms of retail and proximity to Manhattan, it does take a back seat to other parts of brownstone Brooklyn. It’s not hard to understand why it’s a challenge to break the $1 million barrier. Some real estate agencies (and sellers) have clearly set their sites too high. But the neighborhood is an up-and-comer, and $960K is nothing to sneeze at, as downtown denizen points out. I bought my Crown Heights home in 2001 and its value has since tripled. It is over $1 million? Nope. But things are improving all of the time and it’s not unrealistic to think those days are not too far off in the future.
Just out of curiosity, what street is the photo of?
The grammar and spelling in this post is a joke. No wonder people think bloggers are idiots.
By dropping the price below $1MM you also avoid the mansion tax, that could be a big factor here too.
“When people talk about price reductions in these neighborhoods, it’s not about the market, it’s about improper pricing.”
This guy’s statement is absurd on its face. When prices are reduced like this, it says *a lot* about the market.