Chelsea House loft re-seller takes 51 weeks to get 7.5% discount, closing pennies below 2007 purchase

the birthday was a happy one
By the time the sellers of the “1,250 sq ft” Manhattan loft #9F at 130 West 19 Street (Chelsea House) blew out one candle, the loft had been in contract for 5 days, so the occasion was a happy one. Happier still, when the loft closed a month later, taking 3 small price drops to generate a deal that was 3.3% off the last ask, only 7.5% off the first ask (after 13 months), and a measly $1,462 off the net sponsor sale price 58 months earlier.

Of course, no sellers celebrate anniversaries in a marketing campaign, but a contract after 360 days is a thing of joy. Or relief, if the sellers were just worn down by these dates and numbers:

I bet these people rip band-aids off s l o w l y. It took 2 months for the first price drop, the big one at $35,000; then 5 months before a price drop that could easily be confused for a typo (0.064%), then another 3 months before another ‘big’ one. That is 9 months to go $70,000 (4.4%) in 3 moves. After all that fine slicing, they let The Market handle it from there, taking that last $50,000 off to do the deal, just short of the listing’s birthday.

fascinating layout, but not in a good way
There are some very conventional layouts at Chelsea House, a newly-built-in-2006 condominium developments that is as close to an-apartment-not-a-loft development as any building that I track in the Master List of Manhattan Lofts Sold Since November 2008. (But I have been tracking it, and will continue to do so.) Loft #9F does not have a conventional layout.

The #9F floor plan claims “1,250 sq ft”, a size which is usually not difficult to squeeze 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms into. I don’t know how the architects went about creating individual unit floor plans here, obviously, but this one looks like a left-over, after the adjoining units were (rationally) designed: we have 1,250 sq ft, so there must be a way to create 2 bedrooms here. Note that the second bedroom is rather narrow, at 7’11”. (This is one inch narrower than what I had understood as the legal requirements for a “room” per the Building Code, but in doing a quick search for a citation I find that I can’t be sure; this part of the New York city Code may or may not say that; it is hard to parse.) Now look at the wasted space from the door the master bedroom on the way to the only part of the room that a bed could fit in; too narrow to add closets, what do people do with that??

This master jumble of doors and halls leading to the 132 sq ft bed part of the master bedroom is so weird that I wondered if that was the original design, or a post-2006 “improvement” of some sort. But there are 3 other “F” line floor plans in the StreetEasy collection, all of which have the second bedroom as in the #9F floor plan, though not all have solid walls.

In a rational market, you’d think that the wasted space in #9F would be discounted. (We will come back to that thought.)

still a narrow range
In my December 9, 2011, Chelsea House loft at 130 West 19 Street bounces back from nuclear winter sale, I reviewed the two times that loft #7A sold since the sponsor sales (that story is in the headline), and linked to past Manhattan Loft Guy posts about sales 130 West 19 Street. One of those posts was my February 12, 2011, different story for this Chelsea House loft: started with Lehman, ended up off 22%, but up 6.5% lifetime, where I noted that the past 4 Chelsea House sales at that time were:

within a satisfyingly narrow range on a price-per-foot basis (satisfying, for those who prefer their markets rational). The last column below reflects the gain or (loss) since the original sale; those figures are all over the map, suggesting that The (current) Market valuation differences are different from the sponsor’s sense of the relative values among these lofts in 2005 and 2006.

Without that last column, you would never know from this table that #7B got squeezed by the market, or that #4F got a strong price. Isn’t this fun???

Since that recap, there have been only two public sales without outdoor space. The #9F sale a month ago comes to $1,180/ft; the only other public sale without outdoor space was the #7A sale 7 months ago that was the subject of that February 12, 2011 post, at $1,182/ft. Updating the table above extends the range of $/ft values, but only a little (again, the bonus 4th column is gain since the net-price sponsor sales):

Two things, and then I will stop: you cannot say from this distribution of values that the “wasted space” in #4F and #9F had any market impact; these sales are still within a narrow range, though the last two suggest that the building range may be creeping larger.

Are the efficient market fans happy??

© Sandy Mattingly 2012