79 Laight Street loft also being auctioned today (UPDATED)

same celebrity, same mortgage
I noted yesterday that Damon Dash’s loft at 25 N. Moore Street (The Atalanta) had been foreclosed on and was set for auction today (July 27, foreclosure auction tomorrow for 25 N. Moore Street celebrity loft). There is one significant wrinkle to this story: Dash also owned the Manhattan loft #5F at 79 Laight Street (Sugar Warehouse) (as Curbed tried to point out, but had the wrong address) and that loft is also being auctioned today.

What I missed in reviewing property records yesterday is that the mortgage that is being foreclosed on applies to both lofts, as both #3A/4A at 25 N. Moore Street and #5F at 79 Laight Street are listed in the Exhibit A legal description of the mortgaged property (oddly, the mortgage boilerplate then describes both lofts as the borrower’s "primary residence"). According to the "Title Documents" records on Property Shark, the mortgage is recorded only against the 25 N. Moore Street loft, though the lis pendens and auction are noted in the Property History section for #5F at 79 Laight Street.

The mortgage amount now makes much more sense. Dash refinanced both lofts in September 2006 for $7.3mm, though he did it in one mortgage. (I don’t know enough about bank practices to know if including two properties on one mortgage is unusual, though it strikes me that way.) His original 2004 purchase prices were $3.875mm (the Atalanta loft, in February) and $1,807,394 (the Sugar Warehouse loft, in March).

Thirty months later, that (nearly) $5.7mm in 2004 value secured a $7.3mm loan. I’d love to see that 2006 appraisal for these two lofts. Considering that the bank (theoretically) loaned no more than 90% of the ‘value’, the appraisal implied an appreciation on the order of 40% in those 30 months (the $7.3mm mortgage in 2006 is roughly 90% of $8.1mm; $8.1mm is $2.4mm more than the $5.7mm combined purchase prices in 2004; the implied $2.4mm gain from 2004 to 2006 is more than 40%).

that was a bubble, bub
Considering that the September 2006 refinancing was about 18 months before The Peak of the Manhattan real estate market, these two lofts must have been worth a gazillion dollars at The Peak. If not more. (They just weren’t worth what the debtor was trying to sell them for.)

the loft, oddly layered
The debtor did try to sell that loft #5F at 79 Laight Street beginning in November 2007 into August 2008 (with a 4 month hiatus), so we do have a StreetEasy listing for this loft. I went on yesterday (at length!) about the listing history and prices for #3A/4A at 25 N. Moore Street, and I am not going to repeat that for #5F at the Sugar Warehouse.

Suffice it to say that #5F had a tenant for at least some of the marketing period, that the on-and-off-the-market decisions for the two lofts were very different, and that the debtor stopped trying to sell #5F at the Sugar Warehouse as soon as the bank filed a lis pendens against both lofts in mid-August 2008.

At "2,888 sq ft" and three levels, #5F is one of those funky Sugar Warehouse layouts (love ’em or hate ’em). I hit the odd unusual layouts and values in this building earlier this year (January 31, what’s up with this down? Sugar closes on Laight Street under $1,000/ft) and way back on December 4, 2008, Sugar is sweet but 79 Laight Street closing is better. The Sugar sales in that December 2008 post are pretty germane to the tale of #5F. Click through for the details, but here is the money quote from my January 2010 post:

Keep the September 2008 value of $1,083/ft for a duplex with no claim to river views in mind when looking at this (truncated) price history for #5F, a triplex that claims both partial and full river views (sigh):

insult meets injury
That September 2008 value of $1,083/ft for that "2,332 sq ft" duplex was derived from a contract signed August 19 — the day after the bank filed a lis pendens on #5F (and on the Atalanta loft), and the same day that they took #5F off the market. Note the spread between the #5D contract price of $1,083/ft and the #5F asking price that day ($1,264/ft). One has to wonder if they really wanted to sell #5F, or if they appreciated that in August 2008 they were 6 months or so after The Peak.

for you detail freaks
The readers with OCD will want to see the mortgage, which is on the City of New York’s ACRIS system here.

The auction will be in about 90 minutes, unless adjourned.

[UPDATE JULY 28: The Real Deal has tweeted that #5F did not sell at auction, attracting no bid after the bank started at $1,000; unlike the other Dash loft on N. Moore, which sold for $5.5mm. h/t Curbed]

© Sandy Mattingly 2010