Jade loft pod at 16 West 19 Street implies market is up 33% since 2010

it’s true here, but can’t really be true
This math is true: the “902 sq ft” mini-loft with a pod #5C at 16 West 19 Street (Jade) recently sold for $1.2mm after not selling after having been offered for sale for 7 months in 2010 at prices that dropped down to $899,000. That last price was available for two months in Summer 2010, yet was too high to attract a buyer then. Two+ years later, $1.2mm was a relatively easy sale. This math is not true: the overall Manhattan residential real estate market is up more than 33% from September 2010 to February 2013 (when #5C found its contract), making pod #5C a rather dramatic outlier.

it’s a pod, pod, pod, pod world
The pods at Jade are, of course, love ‘em or hate ‘em, and there have been enough people to love them for the 57 units to sell out and for there to be an active after market (6 sales so far in 2013). For the right lacquer-loving neatnik who doesn’t cook much (kitchens here are well-appointed, but the opposite of a “chef’s kitchen” due to the lack of prep space), these spaces are very efficient in a Jetsons kind of way. The #5C floor plan is especially nice of its type, a near square at a corner with east and north exposures. The living room is a spacious 26 x 13 feet, accentuated (if I may babble a bit) by the 5 windows around the corner and 11 foot ceilings; the bedroom is 10 x 15 feet. This floor plan would be a generous prewar apartment 1-bedroom; the charm factor is different with that middle pod than with a classic prewar apartment, of course.

I am not convinced that you will “bask in sunshine” from the 5th floor, what with all the brick out the east windows, but perhaps there is enough reflected light off the building across 19th Street to bask in that. I suspect the bathroom is no more “one of a kind” than any other bathroom in the building with panels that can open at the shower end “to permit natural light in”, but saying the bathroom is “one of 57” does not sound like compelling babble, does it?
 

up 12% since new development purchase in 2007
This recent seller paid $1,074,253 to acquire it from the sponsor in December 2007, which seems a reasonable spread between near-Peak (our listing system has the offer accepted in July 2007, so the new development closing was not an extended affair) and current market. That reasonable 12% spread suggests that it was those 7 months in 2010 that are the real market outlier, rather than the recent sale.

As luck would have it, we have a recent nearby sale that is a highly relevant comp for pod #5C: pod #3C is trivially smaller than #5C (“894 sq ft”) with more of a single exposure rectangle footprint than the corner square two flights up. That shape and single exposure give it no bedrooms, just a dark “sleeping area” at the entry wall. By any rational measure, #3C suffers by comparison to #5C, with a real bedroom and two exposures, but The Market did not quite see it that way.

 
The sponsor thought the different layouts and exposure favored #5C by about 8% back in the day ($1,074,253 for #5C in December 2007, $997,885 for #3C one month later). That sounds to me about right, even today, even with them trading at the same price last month. This may be one of those instances in which a later seller can get a better price by simply being unreasonable insistent. Perhaps the #3C seller knew what #5C was in contract for, and would not sell for less (other than a cosmetic discount).

It ain’t ‘rational’, and it may not even be how this sequence went down, but it is logical in a reverse engineering sort of way.

Back to my consideration of sponsor prices compared to non-sales in 2010 compared to sales in April 2013 …. Am going to provisionally believe that the 2010 market rejection of #5C is the anomalous part of the sequence, rather than the 12% spread between December 2007 and April 2013.

If I see this again in this building, I might try to back out what happened to other pods in 2010, but that’s enough for one post today.

© Sandy Mattingly 2013