53 N. Moore Street loft finds right price, eventually, to sell, eventually

I love history
There is much to love about the listing history of the “1,746 sq ft” Manhattan loft #3A at 53 N. Moore Street (the North Moore) that sold eventually (in case you missed it in the title) for $2.3mm on October 25. (Not to mention, there is much to love about the loft itself.) I cannot decide if my favorite factoid is that it did not sell for 10 months asking only 6.5% more than the eventual clearing price, or that it took more than 5 months at the last asking price to get a (by then) full price contract. Did I mention that the Manhattan residential real estate market is not (always? often?) efficient, or rational?

Follow me down this long (curiously patient) path, which started nearly 2 years ago, with important dates* missing from StreetEasy taken from our data-base:

Now, step back from the path …. No sale at $2.45mm for 10 months overlapping 2009 – 2010 (all post-thaw, clearly), and no contract within 6.5% of that original ask for those 10 months plus another 9 months extending well in to 2011. It cannot be so simple as The Market waiting for the seller to signal ‘negotiability’ via trivial price drops, right?

you can be too thin
That bromide about too-rich-or-too-thin-(not!) does not apply to The Market. The only rational way to look at this extended history is to see it as evidence (a) that the eventual buyers were not actively looking until at least sometime this Spring, (b) that the seller was very stubborn once he reached his line in the sand, (c) that the buyers really liked the loft once they (eventually) saw it, and (d) that the buyers were convinced they had to match The Price if they wanted the seller’s signature on a contract.

I concede it is possible that a long-delayed full price contract suggests a second bidder may have appeared (as a refinement of my “(d)” point), but here is why I think that unlikely. First, it looks as though the eventual buyers showed up in June, as the inter-firm data-base shows a busy open house schedule (2 – 5 every month from December to June) that simply stops after June 26. Second, it is the rare (unheard of by me) bidding war that ends precisely on the asking price.

Net-net, this looks like a stubborn seller who met willing buyers, where that seller had no other qualified buyer and those buyers had no other listing that they liked better for the money. This looks like one tough negotiation, as it took almost 2 months from the last open house to the contract, all to end up at the seller’s (by then, old) asking price. Again: there was only one interested set of buyers, but the seller convinced them that they could not buy at a discount.

Faaaaaaasss – inating stuff.

awkward locutions, new to Manhattan Loft Guy
Babble babble: has anyone ever heard this “location” referred to as “The Park Ave of Tribeca”? Does “location” mean the intersection? N. Moore?? Hudson??? I agree it is a great Tribeca location, but the babble seems inapt.

Quibble, quibble: if it is fair to describe a kitchen with a door-width opening (but no door) as “open yet tucked away”, what is the point of describing a kitchen as “open”?

yet … an efficient micro-niche
Agent-on-agent snark aside, this location / intersection / “Park Ave” can be seen as an efficient market, even if the market mechanisms that took so long for #3A to find a buyer can hardly be described as efficient. There have been only 3 non-penthouse sales in the last 30 months at (how I hate this name) The North Moore Condominium. Though of very different sizes, all sold within a tolerably small $/ft range:

The other two sales were both quick contracts above asking prices, while the whole story of this post is about how long it took the #3A seller to squeeze any buyers to a discounted ask. So #3A is the laggard, but not by all that much: 3.7% off #5H and 7.3% off #2BC, both on a $/ft basis. I wonder if it got punished by discounted in The Market because it is a relatively large 2-bedroom that has no flexibility to add a 3rd.

pushing the comparative market data, 2007 and 2011
Loft #3A last sold on February 20, 2007 at $2.15mm. People who view Paired Resales as the gold standard for measuring market trends (like the boys at Case-Shiller, the folks at StreetEasy, and the old feds at OFHEO) would take this history as some evidence that The Market is up (a bit) in Manhattan. Of course, I made the same point in my September 27, is the Manhattan loft market back to (up to) 2007? 61 repeat sales say “probably”, “a bit”. I continue to update the spreadsheet that contains the details of that analysis (it now has 71 pairs of 2007 and 2011 sales, with the general trend continuing, with 48 pairs showing gains 2011-over-2007 and 23 showing losses). See that post for how to get access to that spreadsheet (it’s free, with no obligation, blah blah blah).

© Sandy Mattingly 2011