Some people have speculated that a town house at 29 Grace Court in Brooklyn Heights on the market for $5.95 million is not selling because it is too pink.
Granted, the walls, the ceiling and the window moldings in the enormous parlor of the four-family home are covered in a bright shade of bubble gum. And after the price was reduced from $6.2 million this month, a reader on the Web site Curbed.com declared in a post: “Beautiful interior bones. Want to sell? Hear these four words … Ben Moore Super White.”
The property, first listed four months ago, could well be overpriced (and overpink), but that is not long these days for a listing in Brooklyn in that price range.
While prices in Brooklyn have bounced back from the housing crash faster than in Manhattan — and prices in some neighborhoods have crept back up toward boom levels — the high-end market now has more competition. When prices for luxury properties in Manhattan were high and inventory was lower, brownstone Brooklyn was drawing wealthy Manhattan buyers willing to cross the bridge to get more space for their money. Buyers who had, for example, $8 million to spend might find acceptable properties in Manhattan costing $10 million or so. But they could get something bigger and better in Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope for $8 million, or even less.
Now, with Manhattan prices on high-end properties still off from the peak, and the gap between asking prices and offers typically still wide, buyers with $8 million could confine their housing search to Manhattan. “That upper price point is now a tougher sell in Brooklyn,” said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal company Miller Samuel.
Buyers looking in both Manhattan and Brooklyn, he said, “are not going to Brooklyn for Brooklyn wholly, they are going there because it’s a deal. Now you pull out the price advantage, and all of a sudden Manhattan looks better.”
The inventory of high-end properties in Brooklyn — typically those for $3 million to $5 million — has always been relatively low. But since the market tanked, resales have been rare at highly sought-after co-ops, like 35 Prospect Park West in Park Slope and 160 Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, and many homeowners appear to be waiting out the market before deciding whether to sell, brokers say.
While the low inventory has protected the borough’s housing prices from a disastrous plunge, it has also meant that brokers do not have a lot to show buyers, who also have more options in Manhattan than before the housing crash.
In January 2008, for example, 540 properties were available in Manhattan for $5 million or more, but that number jumped to 923 in January 2009, before declining to 823 in 2010 and 696 this month, according to Streeteasy.com. Meanwhile there were 21 properties in that price range on the market in Brooklyn in January 2008, 14 in 2009, 19 in 2010 and 15 this month.
Records show that Brooklyn properties listed for $5 million or more are lingering longer on the market than they did before the crash. A five-story town house at 281 Henry Street has been on the market for $5.395 million for almost a year.
Even so, said Frank Percesepe, a Corcoran Group regional senior vice president for Brooklyn, in 2010 “we went from having what I thought was a merely stable market to having a pretty solid year.”
Mr. Percesepe said he had seen more homes selling in the $5 million-and-up range over the last year. Data on brownstone Brooklyn compiled by Michael Vargas, a principal and a co-founder of the Vanderbilt Appraisal Company, showed five such sales in 2010, but only two in 2009, and seven in 2007 during the real estate boom. There were 24 sales for $3 million or more in 2010, compared with 16 in 2009 and 35 in 2007, Mr. Vargas said.
Some brokers are frustrated by the low inventory at the high end. “In the brownstone market, we don’t have a lot to show,” said Michael Guerra, an executive vice president and director of sales for Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Brooklyn division. “And what we have we can quickly exhaust. Brooklyn and Manhattan have a lot in common until you start getting higher into the stratosphere.”
Inhabiting that level in Brooklyn is a five-story, 18-room double-wide town house at 70 Willow Street in Brooklyn Heights, which has been on the market for about eight months with an asking price of $18 million. While renting a garden apartment in the house in the 1950s and 1960s, Truman Capote wrote “In Cold Blood,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and a loving neighborhood tribute called “A House on the Heights.” He called Brooklyn “the only place to live in New York.”
“Those ignorant of its allures are entitled to wonder why,” Mr. Capote wrote in the essay.
Please click here to read the article on nytimes.com
Copyright © 2011 The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission.
