is there a market for a $3mm 1-bedroom loft in Tribeca? (yup: at 25 N. Moore Street)

(in case you were worried)
What is the ‘bigger’ (more impressive) way to describe a 1-bedroom loft: as a $3mm sale, or as “1,886 sq ft”? Both descriptions apply to the Manhattan loft #7C at 25 N. Moore Street (the Atalanta). Both are impressive, but the strange thing about this footprint is that it works very well as a 1-bedroom but has little flexibility to create a second (real, windowed) bedroom — despite being “1,886 sq ft” and having long north and east walls of windows. (Without major renovation, that is.) There is a market for a luxury 1-bedroom loft in Tribeca. (A surprisingly deep one, in fact.)

Mr. Murphy, please call your office
There is room to stash the occasional overnight guest in the (interior, no window) ‘office’, with “a walnut paneled pull down bed”, but you’d have to move the kitchen to find space to put a real bedroom (with window) and even then the second bedroom would be pretty narrow. I wonder if anyone in the “C” line has done that, perhaps by putting the kitchen where the office is in #7C, if the waste lines are kitchen-grade there.

You can’t see it from the StreetEasy listing, but the (also) “1,886 sq ft” loft #10C sold with a curiously different floor plan in 2007 (you will find the floor plan on the Corcoran listing). Loft #10C is also a 1-bedroom plus (interior) office, but in that case the office is too small for the occasional overnight guest (and in the wrong place). What is curious about these two floor plans is that they are not quite the same; although both are said to be “1,886 sq ft”, #7C seems to have more room on the north-to-south axis. And #10C has just one bathroom, in/conveniently located at the deepest part of the master suite; #7C has 2.5 baths.

at an 8% premium to 2007!
I have added #7C to the spreadsheet associated with my September 27, is the Manhattan loft market back to (up to) 2007? 61 repeat sales say “probably”, “a bit” (get access to the spreadsheet by sending me an email request, as noted in that post), as it previously sold on June 11, 2007 at $2.775mm. That listing description seems to describe the same high-level of finishes as the current #7C, but if there were pictures and a floor plan it would be easy to see that #7C was dramatically changed by the June-2007-buyers-turned-September-2011-sellers.

The floor plan survives in our data-base, and shows a 2-bedroom 2-bath configuration, with a library where the current kitchen is, the kitchen (yes!) where the current office is, and the second bedroom in the middle of east wall. Even though the two full bathrooms are in exactly the same places in the loft, they were completely reconfigured.

So it is a apparently mere coincidence that the current #7C configuration is very similar to that of #10C (at least, as it was when #10C sold, also in 2007). Those #7C buyers then turned #7C into what #10C looked like, certainly paying more for the buy+reno than it would have taken to simply buy #10C, and probably more than it would have taken to buy #10C and make that office larger and more accessible.

odd comps
Conventional Wisdom would be that a very large 1-bedroom loft would face a smaller buyer pool than the same loft with a 2-bedroom configuration, all other things being equal, (usually) leading to a lower price. But the opposite happened in 2007, and the people who bought the 2-bedroom configuration paid less and then turned it into another 1-bedroom. Weird science, indeed.

The June 2007 #7C buyers of the 2-bedroom loft did not take the opportunity to buy the 1-bedroom #10C (with better views!) in 2007 … but they had the chance:

Maybe the work involved in turning the 2007 #10C 1-bedroom floor plan into the 2011 #7C 1-bedroom floor plan is more than it looks to me. But it would not have involved moving the kitchen, as they had to do in #7C. And maybe the #7C buyers were bidding on #10C in April 2007 but were not willing to pay 10% above ask for it. Whether or not they lost #10C, they signed a contract to buy #7C at $91,000 discount to #10C one week after the #10C contract.

It almost seems likely to me that that is what happened, given these 2007 dates and what the #7C buyers then did to that loft.

I do not think that this curious pair will cause agents to change their advice to buyers who want to do ‘unconventional’ things to their lofts that might impact the future oh-so-hypothetical Buyer Pool (such as converting a 2-bedroom array to a One Bed Wonder), but it does make me wonder about Conventional Wisdom. Again.

NTS alert!
I don’t generally pay too much attention to the room count in loft sales, as most lofts 1,800+ are flexible enough to permit even a One Bed Wonder to be reconfigured for additional bedrooms, if the will and budget are there. Note to self: pay attention the next time I come across a very large 1-bedroom loft.

© Sandy Mattingly 2011