O’Neill loft at 655 Sixth Avenue sells despite not being marketed from July 2007 to December 2008

otherwise, it was actively marketed
Some marketing campaigns are longer than others; few are as long as this (perhaps none). When the Manhattan loft #3B at 655 Sixth Avenue (the O’Neill Building) finally sold on February 28 for $1.22mm it had been actively offered for sale by 5 different firms, at 8 different prices, and for all but two of the last 25 months before finding a contract by January 3. That’s a whole lot of marketing without much selling; just enough selling, but still ….

Note especially what a bad idea it was to start out too high in 2007 (and then to leave The Market headin to the strongest residential resale Market in Manhattan ever), and the (panicked? ineffective??) reaction to the chilly (nuclear) market conditions when this loft came back to market after The Fall of the House of Lehman:

there is always good news (if we are still alive)
Meanwhile, in the good news portion of the program, that sale last month represented a gain of almost 1% over the initial sponsor sale of $1,120,075 in December 2006.

The loft is a “970 sq ft” corner square, with the single (original) bedroom facing north onto West 21 Street, away from the constant bus and truck traffic up Sixth Avenue. The corner, the 13 foot ceilings, the 9 foot windows, all create a huge volume. Not enough to generate a large premium over 2006 ($1,257/ft over $1,154/ft), but still ….

what were the neighbors doing?
Over the nearly two full years that #3B was on the market from December 2008 through the January 2011 contract, only 5 neighbors who were on sale in that same time sold their lofts, while 13 others tried to sell without success. (The StreetEasy building page with that sad news is here.)

For all the months of marketing that did not work for #3B, the eventual clearing price of $1,257/ft was higher than all the intervening sales in the building since December 2008, other than #2G at $1,340/ft, and that one should not count as a comp for any purpose. Very careful readers of Manhattan Loft Guy will remember the #2G sale as an above-market, no-marketing sale to a neighbor, which I hit in my November 1, 2010, no listing, but VERY motivated buyer for O’Neill loft at 655 Sixth Avenue greases a move to Tribeca.

more good news
So, one could say that #3B did pretty well compared to the neighbors, so long as taking more than two years and 8 different prices to sell does not ruin the party. For all the bad pricing, for all the calendar pages wrppied ripped off, #3B is still the highest resale in the building since December 2008 on a dollar-per-foot basis.

© Sandy Mattingly 2011