Is Brooklyn Really "Booming"?

David Goldsmith

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But that still bleeds into resale because "new" development doesn't stay new so over time the condo stock changes in the resale market, just delayed 5 years.
 

David Goldsmith

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Some interesting tidbits in this article (if accurate):
Downtown Brooklyn up 79% YOY, but Carroll Gardens down 35% and DUMBO down 28%.
 

David Goldsmith

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Brooklyn luxury contracts on the rise after July slowdown

25 contracts for homes asking $2M+ were signed last week, the most since June​

After a slow July, Brooklyn luxury contract signings are on the rise again.
Twenty-five contracts for homes asking $2 million or more were signed in the borough last week, a boost from the previous week’s 15 contracts, according to Compass’ weekly report. It’s the most luxury contracts signed since the last week of June, when 23 such deals were inked.

The asking prices of those contracts totaled $82 million, a jump from the $49.5 million the week before. Buyers inked deals for 13 townhouses and 12 condominiums.

The median asking price for those contracts was $2.6 million, with an average price per square foot of $1,263.

Topping the list was a 6,500-square-foot Boerum Hill townhouse at 311 State Street asking $10 million, or $1,538 per square foot. The home, which is 22 feet wide, has six bedrooms, five bathrooms and three terraces.

Next was a 4,920-square-foot Brooklyn Heights townhouse at 43 Garden Place that was asking $7.9 million, or $1,606 per square foot. The 24-foot-wide home has five bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms across five stories and features a wine cellar and a garden with a patio.
The luxury homes that went into contract spent an average of 163 days on the market and had an average discount of 3 percent.
 

Noah Rosenblatt

Talking Manhattan on UrbanDigs.com
Staff member
Brooklyn luxury contracts on the rise after July slowdown

25 contracts for homes asking $2M+ were signed last week, the most since June​

After a slow July, Brooklyn luxury contract signings are on the rise again.
Twenty-five contracts for homes asking $2 million or more were signed in the borough last week, a boost from the previous week’s 15 contracts, according to Compass’ weekly report. It’s the most luxury contracts signed since the last week of June, when 23 such deals were inked.

The asking prices of those contracts totaled $82 million, a jump from the $49.5 million the week before. Buyers inked deals for 13 townhouses and 12 condominiums.

The median asking price for those contracts was $2.6 million, with an average price per square foot of $1,263.

Topping the list was a 6,500-square-foot Boerum Hill townhouse at 311 State Street asking $10 million, or $1,538 per square foot. The home, which is 22 feet wide, has six bedrooms, five bathrooms and three terraces.

Next was a 4,920-square-foot Brooklyn Heights townhouse at 43 Garden Place that was asking $7.9 million, or $1,606 per square foot. The 24-foot-wide home has five bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms across five stories and features a wine cellar and a garden with a patio.
The luxury homes that went into contract spent an average of 163 days on the market and had an average discount of 3 percent.
Hearing BK is having a kind of 'blow off' top right now, as buyers chase deals
 

David Goldsmith

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Brooklyn continues comeback with 26 luxury deals​

Asking prices of signed contracts totaled nearly $76 million​

Brooklyn’s luxury market saw more contracts signed last week — but for less money.
 

Noah Rosenblatt

Talking Manhattan on UrbanDigs.com
Staff member

Brooklyn continues comeback with 26 luxury deals​

Asking prices of signed contracts totaled nearly $76 million​

Brooklyn’s luxury market saw more contracts signed last week — but for less money.
hard to derail that train. We just need to get used to activity being above historical norms for a while
 

David Goldsmith

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Here is an example of what I don't understand about the narrative. I've followed this since it was listed 8n early August:

First sold for $2,192,237 November 28, 2016 off of a May 1, 2015 contract. Just closed September 26, 2021 for $2,200,000.

Lots of liquidity, lots of action, very fast deal (49 days from listing to closing). But where's the boom? Including closing costs looks like a non-insignificant loss.
 

inonada

Well-known member
Do you mean 49 days contract to closing? Listing to contract seems closer to 6 months.

Lots of liquidity and action are a boom for brokers, even w/ stagnant pricing. Perhaps that’s what drives the perception more than price.
 

Noah Rosenblatt

Talking Manhattan on UrbanDigs.com
Staff member
right looks closer to 6 months then 49 days from cs to close. BK Im hearing mixed things on. Our pulse shows it down from summer highs but still fairly strong - pricing seems to be at the top end of a channel that we have been in for 5 yrs now 1633964094788.png
1633964189398.png
 

David Goldsmith

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Brooklyn’s Fourth Avenue, Known ‘Canyon of Mediocrity,’ Now Has $5 Million Penthouses​

Shlomi Avdoo is standing on the second floor of the 12-story condo he’s building on the corner of Fourth Avenue and St. Marks Place in Brooklyn, gesturing out the window at where the living canopy will go. The canopy, a lushly planted decorative terrace that will wrap around this entire floor, is one of many thoughtful details incorporated into the building, called Saint Marks Place: the terra-cotta façade, the individual loggias (80 percent of the units here have private outdoor space), the illuminated marble alcoves in the master bathrooms. Upstairs, a penthouse recently sold for $5 million, which is serious brownstone money. Yet the scene outside the window — busy, unlovely Fourth Avenue, where a steady stream of box trucks and cars oozes down the traffic-laden thoroughfare — is decidedly not a brownstone view.
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Fourth Avenue is useful but not pretty. It was memorably called a “canyon of mediocrity” after a Bloomberg-era rezoning transformed it from a charmless strip of automotive shops and bodegas into a charmless strip of automotive shops and bodegas interspersed with bland new residential developments. It’s become known as a street of nice-enough efficiency rentals and starter condos, forbidding to pedestrians but convenient if you need to rent a U-Haul or get to the BQE in a hurry. But recently, developers like Avdoo have been putting up buildings that are undeniably luxe, with spas and sunken gardens and other such amenities. They’re very different from the buildings dating to Fourth’s earlier waves of development, where the imperative was to maximize the zoning and residents’ convenience, not improve the local ambience. (The rezoning didn’t require ground-floor commercial space, so early developments put garages with curb cuts there.) Brendan Aguayo, a senior vice-president and managing director at Brown Harris Stevens Development Marketing who worked on some of those first condos, now admits that they were “uninspired, kind of sad-looking buildings.” But, he said, things are different now. “I can see the vision of the neighborhood. The new crop of projects are a significant improvement.”

Saint Marks Place, where a penthouse recently sold for $5 million, has its main entrance on the side street. Photo: Grain London Ltd
Certainly, the new buildings’ prices are different. Parlour, another new condo nine blocks south of Avdoo’s project, sold out earlier this fall, its apartments ranging from $1.8 to $4.75 million. At Saint Marks Place, prices range from $1,300 to $2,000 per square foot. “We are to an extent pushing the market on the upper levels,” said Krystyn Gatto, a director at Avdoo & Partners. And 137 Fourth Avenue has sprawling (for New York, at least) 1,764-square-foot full-floor three-bedroom apartments in the mid-to-high $2 millions. Bill Caleo, co-founder of the Brooklyn Home Company, took it over from another developer who’d started out with plans to build two-bedroom apartments, two per floor. This struck Caleo as wrong-footed, something that might have been appropriate a decade ago but didn’t cater to the current crop of buyers.
When the rezoning passed in 2003, “developers didn’t know if anyone would want to live here. So they created entry-level housing,” Caleo said. “Base apartments, base finishes. I think Fourth Avenue got a bad rap because the quality really wasn’t there.” Now it is. To him, at least, the appeal of Fourth Avenue seems obvious, too — the ability to live in a new space in Park Slope, with better light than a brownstone and open views, close to the subway, the Barclays Center, Gowanus, and Boerum Hill. “Why can’t we make this really special?” Caleo said. “Create an elevated living experience on Fourth Avenue?”

Well, maybe because it’s Fourth Avenue: a highway feeding the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. Jamie Fedorko, an agent at Compass, is pragmatic about Fourth’s transformation: “Clearly, it’s improved. There’s more restaurants and shopping and high-end developments. But the vibe of the avenue hasn’t changed much and won’t change as long as it’s six lanes of traffic to and from the Verrazzano Bridge.” But even that may be changing, at least a little bit. The road now has protected bike lanes in both directions, and there are plans for a raised, landscaped median. Zoning changes also mean that new residential buildings are required to put commercial or retail space on the ground floor. Hypothetically, at least, all these things should make Fourth more welcoming to pedestrians and less of a traffic sewer. “Aesthetically, I think it will get better and better. I’m waiting for the day when it looks like Park Avenue,” said Tonya Benham, a Corcoran agent who has lived near Fourth Avenue for the past 11 years. (Long ago, it was in fact considered the Park Avenue of Brooklyn. By curious coincidence, Park Avenue in Manhattan was once known as Fourth Avenue, and it was an undesirable address until the rail tracks were moved underground.) Besides, busy streets don’t necessarily dissuade wealthy buyers, Benham pointed out, citing the West Side Highway.
brooklyn-fourth-avenue-luxury-penthouses-traffic.html

Parlour has 4,000-square-foot four-bedrooms. Photo: Binyan Studios
Developers do seem wary of leaning into their avenue location, playing up instead the nearby brownstone lifestyle. The builders of Saint Marks, for example, very consciously chose to orient the building around its namesake side street, and Avdoo says a lot of buyers approvingly noted it. Parlour is likewise marketed as “a building that reinterprets the romance of life in a classic brownstone.” And Arbor Eighteen, a now-sold-out condo project, bills itself as a “home that grows with you on the greener side of Brooklyn.” Brooklyn Home Company, meanwhile, is building an adjoining condo around the corner from its Fourth Avenue project, on Butler Street; the two will share amenities and a sales launch and, Caleo hopes, will capture buyers who like the project but may be lukewarm on the location. Not that he thinks they should be. “What is truly the difference between being on Fourth Avenue and having extra light and being on Union between Fourth and Fifth?” he said. “Right now, there is a consumer difference between those things, but there shouldn’t be.”
The thing is, wealthier buyers don’t really need to be convinced — they’re already buying on Fourth, Aguayo pointed out. “Arbor Eighteen, we’re sold out, 251 First Street sold out, Parlour sold out with a penthouse that went for $4.75 million, Saint Marks is 65 percent sold, 6 Garfield is over 50 percent sold,” he said. “The earliest projects, it was mostly Brooklynites, first-time home buyers, young couples. I don’t think the demographic has changed too much, but the price is significantly different and the quality is too. There’s also more demand.” And more Manhattanites and people from the West Coast — about 50 percent of buyers are now from outside Brooklyn, according to Aguayo, up from 25 percent before the pandemic.

“I’ve worked with some buyers, maybe they’re leaving Manhattan for the first time, they’re used to living in a big amenitized condo building on a busy avenue,” said Fedorko, the Compass agent. “Yeah, it’s not pretty, but people want a product you otherwise can’t get in brownstone Brooklyn. They’re more focused on that than the street.”
It helps that the new apartments tend to be large, as large as brownstones in some cases, and don’t need renovation or involve any of the hassles of living in a smaller co-op, where everyone becomes a de facto board member. “At Parlour, they decided to do 2,000-square-foot two-beds and 4,000-square-foot four-beds. They really are competing with brownstones,” said Adam Rolston of INC, the architecture firm that designed Parlour and Saint Marks Place. At the latter, INC used layers of greenery to insulate apartments from noise and less-than-picturesque views and recessed bedrooms away from the avenue. And, brokers pointed out, Fourth Avenue is really a very convenient location, at the nexus of Boerum Hill, Gowanus, and Park Slope, with a subway line on it.
brooklyn-fourth-avenue-luxury-penthouses-traffic.html

Loftlike layouts at 137 Fourth Avenue, where the Brooklyn Home Company opted to do floor-throughs after taking over the project. Photo: Matthew Williams
“It’s a really easy neighborhood for a lot of people,” said Deborah Rieders, a broker at Corcoran. “Not everyone will live there, for sure, but if the building is thoughtfully designed and the prices are commensurate with what people expect, they will. There are always apartments not facing Fourth Avenue.”
And, she added, “the simple truth is that there aren’t a lot of places left to build in prime, prime locations anymore.” Zoning and historic districts mean that most charming brownstone blocks are off-limits to new construction, which tends to get corralled into busy, unsightly locations on the outskirts of quaint neighborhoods: Atlantic, Flatbush, Ashland Place, or Fourth in Downtown Brooklyn, or the cluster of condos around the BQE in Carroll Gardens. Kent Avenue in Williamsburg is on the water, but it’s far from the subway and for years had little in the way of retail. Dumbo is charming, but it’s crisscrossed by highways and trafficky bridge approaches. “What you hear from buyers is almost resignation,” said Fedorko. “‘I understand in my heart this is not where I want to be. But if I want amenities, a door person, I’m probably going to Fourth.’”

But Brooklyn and the reasons people choose to live in the borough have also changed. “The Brooklyn lifestyle, you’re not going to find it on Fourth Avenue, but the new Brooklyn — what is the new Brooklyn? A lot of dense neighborhoods with towering skyscrapers,” Fedorko said. “This low-rise green neighborhood is just not the vision anymore.”
There are also people who’ve lived the brownstone Brooklyn fantasy and realized it wasn’t for them, like John Chan. Chan and his wife bought a gut-renovated townhouse on the border of Prospect and Crown Heights ten years ago. It seemed like an idyllic place to raise a family, but after having two children, they felt like too much of their time was spent dealing with the problems that inevitably cropped up in a 100-plus-year-old house. “As a homeowner, when the roof was leaking, I felt trapped,” Chan said. “We wanted to spend as much time as possible with our kids.” He and his wife decided to buy a three-bedroom condo at 6 Garfield, on the corner of Fourth. Chan said he wasn’t bothered at all by Fourth’s lack of charm — there are plenty of pretty streets nearby if he wants to go for a stroll. “I don’t have to live on a block to enjoy the block,” he said. As for living above a steady stream of traffic, he was just glad that he wouldn’t be stuck in it anymore. The location is so convenient — close to his kids’ schools, the arts scene in Gowanus, and restaurants in Park Slope and a half-block from the subway — that he plans to sell their car as soon as they’re able to move in this spring.

 

David Goldsmith

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Brooklyn new development sales top $1.5 billion in 2021​

Activity slowed in Q4, but higher-end homes enjoyed a year-end boost​


Believe the homebuying hype: Brooklyn new development contracts this year smashed recent years’ totals with larger, more expensive homes leading the charge.
New development contracts in 2021 totaled $1.54 billion, a 150 percent increase from last year and 77 percent jump from 2019, according to a year-end report from Brown Harris Stevens Development Marketing (BHSDM).
This year, 898 new development contracts were signed. The average home signed was 1,220 square feet, a five-year high, and price-per-square-foot climbed to $1,680, up 43 percent year over year.

Activity slowed slightly in the fourth quarter, with just 188 contracts, compared to an average of 237 per quarter for the rest of the year. But demand remained robust, particularly for larger homes, as 22 percent of contracts were for units with three bedrooms or more.
“The high-end Brooklyn market also stood out, with record sales and cementing new luxury product expectations in an outer borough,” said Stephen Kliegerman, president of BHSDM.

Homes worth $1-2 million made up 37 percent of contracts signed, making it the hottest sector in the borough. Demand outstripped supply in the category, as only 32 percent of marketed units were listed in that price range.

Another 13 percent of contracts signed in the fourth quarter were for homes worth between $3-4 million, a record in that sector for the borough. Four contracts broke the $6 million mark, also a quarterly record.
“The strength of the high end represents new price points for this market, demonstrating the growth of luxury new development product, not just townhomes, in the Brooklyn market,” said Robin Schneiderman, managing director of BHSDM.

Not all neighborhoods fared the same. Dumbo, Brooklyn Heights and Downtown Brooklyn posted 87 contracts in the fourth quarter, more than double the amount signed in the same time span last year. But contract activity declined in Prospect Heights, Park Slope, Flatbush and Prospect Park South.
While contract activity slowed in the fourth quarter, that drop is a response to insufficient supply, not demand, according to Laura Tomana, vice president of research and market analytics at BHSDM.

New development sales also stayed hot in Manhattan, where volume tripled year over year and broke pre-pandemic numbers by a wide margin.
 

David Goldsmith

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Note starting at about 3:40:

Brooklyn Resale Condominium $/SF sales have been about flat for the last 8 years. I think you need to consider that the quality/expense of finishes in Brooklyn Condos has been a fairly straight line upwards for over a decade. So there should have been some increase in $/SF resale price simply due to the different product mix.
 

David Goldsmith

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Still seeing stuff like this:

Feb 21, 2022CLOSED$1,018,000Buzulencia, Jeff Adam
Surendran, Subina
View ACRIS Filing
Sep 17, 2021OFF MKTlast asking $1,175,000
Jul 27, 2021$20,000$1,175,000
Apr 14, 2021$55,000$1,195,000
Mar 15, 2021FOR SALE$1,250,000Ryan SerhantSerhant
May 1, 2017CLOSED$1,175,000Tanenbaum, Jesse
Tanenbaum, Andrea
View ACRIS Filing
Feb 2, 2017CONTRACT SIGNEDlast asking $1,200,000
Dec 2, 2016FOR SALE$1,200,000Heather McmasterThe Corcoran Group
View Less
 

David Goldsmith

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David Goldsmith

All Powerful Moderator
Staff member
As opposed to Manhattan and Queens (LIC/Hunters Point) many of Brooklyn's new construction condos are small projects. And the price reductions have started, just like SFR builders across the country.

 
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