walking up is hard to do: primitive loft at 37 Walker Street sells with 4 flights of stairs down 5% since 2006, sorta

how many stairs in the listing?
I am going to try very hard not to snark (too much) about the broker babble that supported the recent sale of the sizzling pad (oops) “2,191 sq ft” Manhattan loft on the top two floors at 37 Walker Street, because the real story about the sale is how it compares to a lower floor sale in 2006 and the real (not too snarky) story from the babble is what’s not there.

I am not going to quote the babble, else the temptation will prove to be too much, but we are dealing with a duplex with 15 foot ceilings on a least the top floor, large windows, exposed brick and hardwood floors. There is no floor plan (don’t get me started), but the building photo shows a narrow building and Google Maps shows a building both narrow and short; at “2,191 sq ft” (per The Shark), in round numbers that is two boxes of about 1,000 sq ft each, guessing about 15’ x 65’. Figure a total gut job, as the pictures show nothing but grit and character, and te description claims 2 kitchens, 1.5 baths and a professional dark room.

The loft took from June 13 to October 24 to get to contract, asking $1.8mm and clearing on December 4 at $1.6mm.

As in the lede, the real story about that price for a gut job loft on a block no one would confuse with prime Tribeca is that in April 2006 he “beautiful wreck” on the 3rd floor sold for $1.52mm. That was only “1,978 sq ft” and it has to be another duplex, and has to be smaller than the 5th-6th floor unit because the higher floor has less waste from the stair. (I’ll come back to that.) So … a wreck (though beautiful; love that!) sold for $768/ft in April 2006, while a “Sizzling Pad … Dramatic and Spacious Loft” (forgive me, this once) sold for $730/ft in December 2012.

That makes no sense, but a little less no-sense when you see that the last two words in the 2006 3rd floor babble are “Walk up”. Of course a lower floor is worth more than a higher floor in a building without an elevator. But you’d never know that from the top floor duplex, either from StreetEasy or from the broker website.

Seriously: how many people cursed the agent on arriving at the bottom of 4 flights of stairs? How many walked away, still cursing?

There are not enough examples to easily prove this, but it seems obvious to me that same-building loft values from 2006 to 2012 should be up, in the 5-10% range at least. It also seems obvious that the extra 2 flights of stairs from the 3rd floor to the 5th floor duplex should be worth something on the order of $100,000, without an elevator.

With that pushing and pulling, the spread between 3rd floor in $768/ft in April 2006 and the upper floors at $730/ft in December 2012 is stil too high. But that’s what the cold, cruel market did; I’d like to believe that The Market relatively rewarded the “beautiful wreck” poetry and punished the mess of a “Sizzling Pad … Dramatic and Spacious Loft” (snap!), but then I am a loft romantic. And unable to avoid some snark, especially in service of a valuation exploration.

© Sandy Mattingly 2013