In the past few weeks, several Digs Watch listings have been cut down a bit from their lofty goals. While I wouldn’t necessarily look at these price chops as indicative of any broad market trends, other than that aspirational pricing almost always retreats to a more market-driven level before meeting a buyer (which is always the case), there is certainly a feel that the market has perhaps plateaued in Q4...
February, 2008 – Sold $4,250,000 December, 2011 – Sold $3,500,000 October, 2014 – Listed $6,350,000 This week’s Digs Watch takes us to the former Jehovah’s Witnesses printing and shipping facility turned amenity-rich Brooklyn waterfront condo behemoth One Brooklyn Bridge Park. The building is located on the southwestern fringe of Brooklyn Heights, and as the name suggests, in the middle of the...
Stay Away from NYC Ground Lease Co-ops! Ground leases are relatively common in New York City commercial real estate. Some of New York’s most notable properties, like the Chrysler Building, are encumbered by one. In a ground lease, the owner of land leases it to a developer with the intent that the developer will build something valuable on it. The term of a ground lease is typically very long (for...
October 22, 2013 – listed $4.187MM (removed October 23, 2013) October 24, 2014 – listed $5.9MM Rather than examine a resale’s wild price swing, this week’s Digs Watch takes a look at a wild price swing from a prior list price (albeit for a listing that was removed from the market after only 1 day). We go north of the border – that is, north of that natural neighborhood border otherwise known as...
Move Madison Square Garden to Hudson Yards! I recently read an article that discussed the future of Madison Square Garden. Here are my thoughts: For more than 60 years, the destruction of the original Penn Station – McKim, Meade and White’s 1910 Beaux Arts masterpiece – has relegated proud New Jersey Transit, Long Island Railroad and Amtrak commuters to an existence akin to that of a sewer rat (or...
Developer Ashkenazy Acquisition is seeking special approval to install ground floor retail space to replace the good-intentioned, but ill-conceived, public space located in the ground floor retail component of the Bel Canto condominium, a residential tower adjacent to the Upper West Side’s Apple Store near Lincoln Center (and Grandma Bunny). In 1985, when the condominium building was built, in what was...