was Great Jones Street loft a million dollar renovation?

more or less, and sold at $1,300/ft
The April 22 sale of the Manhattan loft #4F at 48 Great Jones Street at $3.24mm represents a huge premium over the year-old sale of #5R in the same building at $2,262,500, as the two lofts are roughly the same size (“2,500 sq ft” vs. “2,575 sq ft”) with similar light ( “light filled” vs. “flooded … with light”), though in very different condition. Cherry-picking the broker-babble, the high-flying #4F is

… an impeccable renovation … with museum quality lighting … designed with meticulous attention to detail and materials. Each area has full-height recessed doors which permit multiple levels of openness or privacy. Every room is wired for B&O sound with remote sensors. … multi-zoned central A/C. … The architect also gave careful thought to changing family needs and intelligently designed luxurious large open spaces that can easily be adapted by a growing family to create four separate bedrooms ….

Reading between the lines of babble, the 2-bedroom-1-bath #5R was a bit primitive, a bit of a project:

Classic and elegant loft … Beautifully proportioned with 11 foot ceiling and traditional loft details, including exposed brick, cast iron columns and original wood floors. … Sliding walls and curtain walls between bedrooms and living space allow for a seamless flow and pure loft openness. There are limitless configuration possibilities to create your dream three bedroom, two bath home

The Market valued the impeccable+meticulous #4F at $1,296/ft in April 2011, but the create-your-dream #5R at only $879/ft in April 2010. How much of that $417/ft difference is a change in market in a year? (Probably not much.) It seems that the #4F sellers created a million bucks in value, but did they spend a million bucks to do it?

days of froth, remembered
I hope that the #4F sellers did not spend a million bucks to create that value, because that would wipe out their gain. It happens that they bought #4F in the frothy days leading up to The Peak, closing on December 1, 2006 (about 5 quarters short of a Peak) at $2,146,500, not quite a $100k premium to the then-asking price. They bought the explicit “potential” that they turned into that impeccable renovation, as #4F was then an “original artist … loft”. By some miracle of the inter-tubes the former PruDE listing from 2006 remains on the web (sshhh!), here, showing a very primitive floor plan and set of finishes.

As suggested by the 2006 bidding war, there is some nearing-the-Peak froth in that closing price. The result of that old war and recent sale is a clear market value of the specific renovation: precisely $1,093,500. I am certain that the impeccable renovation and the “meticulous attention to detail and materials”, not to mention the “careful thought” could not have been had for my rough ballpark of $200/ft for a basic gut, especially in 2007 when trades and craftsfolk were at a premium. How much more than $200/ft (and how far from $417/ft) will determine how much ‘profit’ there was in that renovation (before considering other expense in the 2006 purchase and the 2011 sale, of course). Maybe they did not make much money on this buy-fix-and-sell, after all.

And, yes, that is a crass (and mercantile) way to look at the history of these folks and #4F. I surely hope they got much enjoyment out of the beautiful work that they did. They have lovely taste. But The Market is The Market is The Market, and I am here to comment on why and how lofts sell where they do.

viz, my brain aches
I am 99.16% sure that I have never before seen broker-babble with the abbreviation “cf” before. As in:

The architect also gave careful thought to changing family needs and intelligently designed luxurious large open spaces that can easily be adapted by a growing family to create four separate bedrooms. (cf the alternate floor plan).

I used to know what all of those scholarly abbreviations meant, but I had to look this one up to confirm that this is not quite the correct usage. The Wiki reminds me that “cf” comes from the Latin, of course and “is translated, and can be read aloud, as ‘compare’.” I think the babbling broker here intends the parenthetical to refer to the alternate floor plan as an example of an adaptation to create 4 bedrooms, in which case the proper abbreviation from the scholarly Latin is “e.g.”, for example, which is commonly used in even current polite conversation (much more common than “cf”) if not often in listing descriptions.

Or was he going for “viz.”, as in "namely", "that is to say", and "as follows"? This fancy stuff is treacherous! Especially in broker-babble if you don’t get it exactly right. Oy! (not Latin 😉

© Sandy Mattingly 2011