876 Broadway comes + goes QUICKLY / knowing what you can get, and getting all of it

if you blinked, you missed it
The Manhattan loft on the 3rd floor of 876 Broadway hit the Market on April 26, hard, at $1.995mm. So hard, in fact, that they were in contract five weeks later 2.3% off the ask. It closed on August 21. Props to the sellers and to the Elaine Schweninger team at PruDE.

This "2,500 sq ft" loft on Broadway between 18th and 19th Streets has serious old-school Manhattan loft charm: pine columns, 14 ft ceilings, wainscoting (check the pix for the size of the windows!). These sellers include an architect and they have owned here a long time, but there’s no indication in the listing of when a renovation was last done (and the surviving pix on StreetEasy are too small to read too much into). My guess is that the loft may need an ‘update’ if not a more extensive renovation.

 

As configured, there is a huge amount of utility within the "2,500 sq ft", including 3 bedrooms (with windows on the rear) plus a 4th ‘bedroom’ with no window but an en suite bathroom (called a "den" in the listing), and a pair of mezzanined home offices atop the plumbing on opposite long walls. I get the feeling from the floor plan that the space evolved (rooms, offices were added) as the owners’ needs changed over 20+ years.

feet, size and volume
The listing description is selling volume: "[v]olume speaks the minute you step off the elevator", with those "truly soaring" 14 ft ceilings. Interesting that they use "2,500+ square foot" as the size, as they (thankfully) explicitly exclude the mezzanine space. The building footprint is 41×82 ft, per Property Shark so using "2500+" is a relatively conservative approach to this vexing issue on loft coops. Apparently, there is no size convention for the building, as the 4th floor loft was marketed in 2006 as "3,000 sq ft".

comp suggests a reno project
That 4th floor loft was sold as a temple of high design (a paraphrase, but read the description, please). And temples are not cheap. That one zoomed through the very different market of 2006: offered at $3.2mm on March 2, 2006 it was in contract by April 24 at $3.15mm.

That is rather a large gulf between these two full floor lofts and their respective values, one marketed in 2006 as a temple of design that cleared at $3.15mm and one highlighting "volume" that just cleared the (very different) market at $1.95mm. (Hence my guess that #3 needs ‘some’ work.) Not likely that there is $1.2mm worth of renovation difference between the two units.

wanting to sell, selling
All of which suggests that these long-time owners realized that The Market had changed, recognized that their loft would (likely) be perceived as in a more primitive state than the 4th floor, and were realistic about what it would take to sell in the very, very, very tin market of Spring 2009. To use a somewhat offensive term, they decided not to be "greedy". But they sold. Again, major props.
 

© Sandy Mattingly 2009