replete loft at 39 White Street just misses $1,000/ft but flies through market

a secret for far too long
The “1,925 sq ft” Manhattan loft on the 4th floor at 39 White Street sold on February 7 for $1.92mm but somebody kept it a secret until the deed was filed on March 26. It’s a shame they kept it a secret, as it is a lovely loft (indeed, it is “architecturally replete”) that sold pretty darn quickly: to market on November 12 at $2.05mm, in contract by December 14. That’s 87 days from “selling” to “sold!!”.

paging Inigo Montoya
The renovation was “recently completed”, which in this case means at least since these sellers bought the loft in April 2007 for $1.6mm. In those days, the loft was a “fixer upper” in “original condition”. Those sellers were asking $1.45mm in September 2006 and had trouble selling only in the sense that it went into contract twice before closing 7 months after starting: note that the clearing price exceeded the asking price by 10%. The spread between the two sales of $320,000 works out to $166/ft. I doubt you could get a complete build-out at $166/ft in 2007 (when all the trades were working overtime), let alone a build-out that is “architecturally replete”.

While I am not sure if that is a renovation that is full of architects or full of architecture, the babble is most enthusiastic about the whole thing, using a thesaurus’ worth of modifiers. The footprint is classic Long-and-Narrow, with the plumbing in the middle of one long side behind the stairs. The floor plan implies a second bedroom (with a window, it’s legit) used more as a guest room, as it leads to the master that runs the entire width of the back wall. The neat architecture trick (replete!) was to provide a second entry for the master, through the kitchen, for the times those “massive sliding steel doors” are closed at either end of the second bedroom. (How soundproof are they?, one wonders.) I wish there had been a picture of them…

different market dynamic on the block last year
The last time I was on this block (in a blogging sense) was my June 8, 2010, 36 White Street misses the party, closes (off the radar) like its 2005, when I crossed the street to beat up on a guy who left money on the table by selling in 2010 for $1,337,500 what he had bought in 2005 for $1.275mm. That loft was in “spectacular” condition, so the $877/ft was probably the result of bad pricing strategy; sometime between being professionally marketed from October 2008 (yes, immediately post-Lehman, brrrr) and selling in June 2008 that loft could have gotten much closer to the $997/ft that the 4th floor at 39 White Street just got. But that one was priced wrong, for long.

The 4th floor at 39 White Street was priced right. Quite.

© Sandy Mattingly 2011