One York loft finally sold by sponsor, with or without shirt

it had been rented, hadn’t it??
I cannot find a complete past history of the Manhattan loft #9A at 1 York Street (One York, d’oh!) that sold on May 25, but I can tell you that our data-base shows that it was first offered for sale in 2005, and that it had been offered as part of the entire 9th floor (per StreetEasy, since 2007). I don’t see a rental listing in our data-base, but I have to wonder if it had been rented out in the last six years rather than just sitting there.

I am going to walk through a few numbers here, as the sale price struck me as curious, give the history below. Not that I have the data to explain, but it is just curious….

The “1,969 sq ft” #9A is the last of the 3 9th floor lofts to be sold, with the “1,589 sq ft” #9B having sold on February 8 ($3,563,875) and the “1,674 sq ft” #9C having sold on August 20 ($3,431,025). At $4,734,862, #9A got the highest price of ther three on a $/ft basis for the interior space:

• #9A $2,404/ft
• #9B $2,242/ft
• #9C $2,049/ft

I can’t say whether the price differentials are due mainly to the outdoor space in two units (#9B has a “235 sq ft” terrace; #9A a “80 sq ft” terrace), but I am really most interested here in the fact that these lofts took 5 years to sell. (Again, I assume they’ve been rented out in that time, but I can’t see that, except for #9C having been rented once, in September 2010 for $12,000/mo.)

bookkeeping gets complicated
It is very hard for an outside to determine how well (or poorly) a developer did on an eventually-sold-but-perhaps- partially-rented loft, such as these three on the 9th floor, as there are just too many variables invisible to an outsider.

But it is at least interesting that they eventually sold (very eventually) at higher prices than originally offered. It gets complicated cross-checking the separate listing histories, but the StreetEasy record of the listing for the entire 9th floor from 2007 was at $11.2mm. The eventual net of the 3 eventual sales was $11,729,762.

I assume that the 2007 pricing was set to earn a nice profit for the developer. I also assume that the fact that they ended up selling at a half-million dollar premium to that 2007 pricing is a distraction: if we could see all the numbers we would likely see that these sales resulted in a net loss compared to original expectations, as it had to be expansive to carry these lofts for 5 years.

© Sandy Mattingly 2011