agent sells Chelsea Mercantile loft from San Francisco

even north is a happier face
You need to do some extra clicking on StreetEasy to get the full narrative on the successful marketing campaign that just got $2.2mm for the “1,586 sq ft” Manhattan loft #7G at 252 Seventh Avenue (the Chelsea Mercantile). With a neighbor down the hall having recently sold at $1,041/ft, it helps to make sense of that $1,387/ft result if you have been following the Manhattan Loft Guy thread about views and dollars in this Chelsea icon  (That low sale was explained in my Apr. 23, Chelsea Mercantile loft with few windows-per-foot sells without view at $1,040/ft (again!).) Not that #7G had a “view”: you have to go to the Citi-Habitats site to get a Full Screen View option, but there it is plain that all windows face the tall building across 25th Street. That is still preferred by the market to the #7A courtyard “view”, though #7A has the additional deficit of a very inefficient floor plan, with but 3 windows.

I am not going to repeat (again!) the view per dollar sensitivities at The Merc (you’re welcome) but will get right into the weeds of listing history (ugh). The main link from StreetEasy associated with this deed record is linked in my first sentence, but that history actually ends 6 months before the sale and is not the listing that actually sold. Click this link to another Citi-Habitats listing that begins 2 weeks after the other one ends to see the concluding part of the narrative. Here is the short story: the two listings share firms, text and pix, but are by different agents. The first agent is also one of the sellers (see that deed record link above), who seems to have left New York and surrendered his real estate license in December, which has to be why the other agent picked up the listing 2 weeks later.

Here is the integrated listing history, which includes this StreetEasy listing as the origin point:

That is hardly a smooth sale, though it did eventually work out at a price that sits rationally within the hyper-local market comps. That is nearly 11 months of active marketing over 13 months to get to contract, taking 4 prices to get a final discount-from-ask of only 3%, and an all-in discount of only 10%.

agent = owner = additional disclosure
Do you see anywhere in the first or second parts of the listing history any mention of the fact that the agent is one of the sellers? I don’t either. As I hit only two weeks ago (in my May 24, 40 Mercer Street news: nothing says successful new development like a 7-figure gain since 2007), New York State law requires that consumers be told if an agent has an ownership interest in the property being marketed. (I just noticed that that advice from counsel for REBNY used the word “broker” where he probably meant “agent”.) The advice quoted there from counsel for REBNY suggests that this disclosure be made when the standard NYS Agency form is provided to consumers, but I see no reason not to put it in the listing description.

Since I don’t know if the appropriate disclosure was made in that way, I can’t say that the agent-seller or firm did anything wrong. But it seems to me to be better practice to also put it in the broker-babble, that way it is revealed even before an unsuspecting consumer calls the agent, or walks in to the open house. But I neither write the rules nor advise REBNY.

agent = owner = San Francisco renter
Of course I checked out the notice address for the sellers in the deed record, wondering if they moved from the classic Manhattan loft the Chelsea Mercantile condominium to a funky San Francisco loft inn the fashionable SOMA district. Alas, that address is in SOMA, but there are probably as many 38-story lofts in San Francisco as there are in New York (hint: zero), and the sellers’ new building is no exception.

Cool that The Wiki has an entry for the sellers’ new 40-story building in San Francisco, identifying it as the highest residential building in that city for 6 years, and as “the tallest concrete-framed [building] located in Seismic Zone 4”. I hope that it is a good thing. (Not so cool that the Wiki entry is so short and that 5 of 12 line are devoted to a suicide there, but that’s The Wiki for you.)

Best of luck to that former agent in The (other) City, with the fog and the earthquakes. He should be pretty flush, having just sold for $2.2mm the Chelsea Merc loft that he bought in 2002 for $1.225mm.

© Sandy Mattingly 2012