not gussied, 46 Great Jones Street loft sells after 363 days, down 42% from first ask

I don’t find that in my (out of date?) handbook
I don’t think I’ve seen this locution to describe an “authentic” Manhattan loft before: “NOT Gussied Up”. I think it like it, but the fact that it sticks out probably means it is effective. And, because The Babbling Agent Handbook says you can never gild the lily too often, that bit of broker babble is followed by “They Dont Make em Like This Anymore” (too bad about the apostrophe dropping there, eh?). I don’t like that in this context, as it suggests a lack of confidence in the no-gussy punch, especially as that is followed by “Beautifully Authentic”. I think they have set the tone here. Again. And again. The good news is that the subject of all this babbling, the “4,000 sq ft” duplex Manhattan loft on the 3rd and 4th floors at 48 Great Jones Street, lives up to the billing (if not, for a long time, the pricing).

You’ve got air conditioners at the top of windows, fans with pull chains (authentic!), junction boxes on beams, exposed brick, a raised kitchen (presumably to run waste lines), at least one old school radiator, and exposed pipes and mechanicals galore. The pictures tell the story, but either one element is not as impressive as it sounds, or it as not pictured: I was disappointed not to have recognized that “Curving Corrugated Sculptural Steel Wall Delineates Whats Now A Workspace”. Of all the “authentic” elements, that is the one I suspect would have the greatest chance of surviving a Buy & Reno. (Or perhaps the “Uber-Cool Custom Bauhaus Water Basin & Stand”, though that sounds awfully gussied up.)

a double Long-and-Narrow can be limiting
The floor plan shows the same Long-and-Narrow footprint repeated on each floor. While I appreciate the enthusiasm behind describing the space as “Expansive Size (Whopping 3500sf)”, the footprint actually shows the limits of the Long-and-Narrow form. The loft is less than 21 feet wide, with 3 windows at each end, and is squeezed at both ends; at the south by the public stairwell leaving room for only one “room” at that end, and at the north by all the plumbing along the west wall.

Unless you radically reconfigured by moving the kitchen south along the long wall to open up room for a bedroom in the back of the 3rd floor and/or moved a great deal of plumbing on the back of the 4th floor to squeeze two bedrooms on that back wall (the 3 windows make it hard to allocate that [mere] 21 feet of width), you are left with a “Whopping” One Bed Wonder. Seriously: there are no side windows for (true) bedrooms, the front on each floor is too shallow to separate and is very far from any plumbing. This is a very challenging footprint, the more so because there is all this “space” but not (really) much “room”.

Add up-ing and down-ing to the list of challenges. Personally, I hate spiral stair cases, especially in large spaces, and I believe that the $4mm loft buyer pool shares my antipathy. There’s nothing grand or luxurious about a spiral stair case of conventional scale, like the one here; either the Buy & Reno buyer will vastly increase the diameter of the spiral, or will install a straight or single landing stair. In each case, the new floorplan will have larger holes for the stairs (probably back toward the middle of the east wall), again limiting the floor space.

Just as the proverb dictates that you can never be too rich or too thin, in Manhattan loft terms you can never have enough space. I am sure clever architects will do better than I have in scanning the possibilities here, but this whopping “3,500 sq ft” plays much smaller than it is.

let us pray
The litany of prayers asking prices reflects that The Market also saw this space as challenging; certainly much more challenging than the sellers and agents saw it (you need to also look at the StreetEasy history after the seller changed firms, here, to get this full story):

Yesterday I hit a post-renovation Tribeca loft with a similar sad story (February 6, 106 Duane Street loft sellers built a beauty then aimed at the moon (fell more than 200,000 miles short, alas)), with 11 months to contract, 7 prices, and two firms. If it is fair to rank the pain of others, those folks put a lot of money and talent into their loft, only to have The Market say “meh”; these folks in Noho took a year to get a contract, using two firms and 8 prices, to end up selling at a 42% discount to where they’d started. Apart from the “Uber-Cool Custom Bauhaus Water Basin & Stand”, of course, they proudly did not gussy the place up in however many years they lived there “authentically”. There’s likely to be little consolation in that for them personally, but The Market is what The Market is. In this case, as yesterday, cruel, but today not as personally cruel as to heavily discount an expensive renovation.

This likely gut renovation project with a very challenging footprint sold for $872/ft on a block that is more funky Noho than cool Noho. Oh how I wish I could see what the buyers do in their renovation!

© Sandy Mattingly 2013