stubborn seller of 130 Fulton Street loft takes 10% haircut

yes, we have a word for the week
Now that we know that it is not a slur to call a seller with a sticky asking price “stubborn”, here’s another one: when the Manhattan loft #11B at 130 Fulton Street closed on July 11 at $2.01mm, that capped a campaign that began by asking $2mm at The Peak and resumed in September 2010 at $2.195mm. Ignore the confused and confusing StreetEasy listing history (Property Shark shows that the original purchaser was the recent seller) and focus on these details, starting with the sponsor sale:

(*The contract date is from our data-base, not StreetEasy.)

What makes this seller particularly stubborn in my book is not that he held to the same asking price for 8 months; it is that the asking price he held at was 10% above the price that had been tried for 5 months at the end of the most active residential real estate market ever in Manhattan, and had not worked.

stubborn is as stubborn does
I don’t talk about active listings any longer, so the only stubborn sellers I talk about are just that, sellers. They are people who have successfully found a buyer to give them money to take the loft off their hands. There have to be many more examples of stubborn ‘sellers’ who never find those buyers than those who do (it seems to me), and for them being stubborn was not a virtue.

The seller of #11B must be my poster child for (successfully) stubborn sellers. The guy tried to flip immediately; when that did not work he rented it out at least part of the time (we show a 2009 rental at $9,990/mo) and re-launched a sales campaign last September, asking that 10% premium over his early-flip price and getting a tiny premium over that.

a “re-design” with 3 exposures
The broker babble says the loft

has had a carefully considered, re-design from when it was bought from the developer. Lots of love and $$$ were put into the home with only the highest end finishes and detail.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell if that “re-design” (intentionally not called a “renovation”, I assume) happened before or after November 2007 so I don’t know if the “lots of love and $$$” were baked into that original flipping price. My guess is yes, as that would account for waiting four months to start flipping and upgrading finishes and custom touches would be easier to accomplish in that time frame than a true renovation.

Whatever, it is a heck of a loft, for people who can live with the short-ish-term issue fo all that construction on (and just west) of Fulton Street and the long-term issue of a tax abatement ending in 2016. This “2,280 sq ft” loft is only on the 11th floor, but has 19 windows and views of the Brooklyn Bridge, Woolworth Building and the Municipal Building (not the Gehry rental on Spruce Street??). In Lower Manhattan, views are all about the angles, what you see between to get to what you see.

anals of chutzpah
The last sale in the building before loft #11B provides an interesting data point in considering #11B’s aggressive campaign. Loft #9B is two floors below (d’oh!) and has a bit more space, with “2,794 sq ft”. That babble does not claim upgrades over the sponsor sale condition, but it is still pretty enthusiastic about the finishes. The sponsor found out the original market value was $2,173,963 in June 2006 ($778/ft, compared to the original $737/ft for #11B 13 months later).

When #9B sold on December 3, 2010 at $2.25mm, #11B had been on the market for 11 weeks and was still five months from a contract. By the time #11B sold, the spread with #9B was reversed: #9B at $805/ft, #11B at $882/ft. Maybe the #11B seller put nearly $200,000 in custom finishes, but I doubt it.

That seller wanted his price. And (by being stubborn) got it. Props and more props. It is nice when it works.

© Sandy Mattingly 2011