The Real Deal

• Email this article
• print
• Comments(1)

Top outer borough condos: Staten Island condos level off

Port Regálle is a Mediterranean-inspired townhouse project started on former wetlands in the 1980s.

Go to chart: The top 10 most expensive Staten Island condos

Unlike New York City's other four boroughs, which continued to post record-breaking condo sales and signed contracts into 2008, Staten Island's top 10 most expensive condos were nearly all sold before mid-2006, all in projects started in the 1980s.

Figures provided by Property Shark indicate that even some of those high-end properties may have seen depreciation in value.

Still, amazingly enough, those record prices for condos in Staten Island, New York City's most suburban-like borough, where the housing stock is mainly single-family homes, are less than the average condo price in Manhattan.

In Port Regálle — a Mediterranean-inspired townhouse project started on former wetlands in the 1980s — top condos sold for an average of $360 per square foot between 2003 and 2006. Since then, the average has dropped to $328 per square foot. The project also ran into financial troubles, was taken over by the bank, and is in the process of being completed by another developer.

The Great Kills development still claims nine of the 20 most expensive condos in Staten Island, including the record-breaker, a 2,048-square-foot, three-story townhouse-style condo purchased in 2005 for $989,000 by real estate attorney William O'Neill.

The properties' multi-tiered back porches overlook the glistening Great Kills Harbor, dotted during the summer with private boats that dock along its coastline. But from the front, they overlook a construction site still in progress.

Another of the top condominium projects, Bay Street Landing in St. George, had serious issues with water leakage when it opened in the 1980s, said Norma Sue Wolfe, one of the first residents and a saleswoman at Gateway Arms Realty Corporation.

Three of the buildings in that development, converted seaside warehouses, are complete — two co-ops and a condominium, 80 Bay Street Landing, which Wolfe said sold out in 1996. The building claims three of the borough's top 20 sales at between $670,000 and $695,000, for up to 2,579 square feet.

Developer Leib Puretz, who is not responsible for the other three buildings, is nearing completion on a fourth conversion in the gated community, known as the Pearl. While that building also had water leakage issues, Sal Raziano, a sales agent at the project's marketing firm, Cassandra Properties, insisted they have been resolved.

Puretz also built a new 57-unit building across the street, the Pointe, which is half sold after nine months on the market, according to Raziano.

Meanwhile, Joseph Riccardi, head of the condo board at a tower also built in the 1980s in the predominantly Italian neighborhood of Rosebank, said his building has a waiting list. He owns the borough's second most expensive condo, a 3,500-square-foot penthouse with two generous terraces that he purchased for $850,000 two years ago.

He attributed his building's success to its quiet, safe atmosphere. Riccardi, a 40-year-old vice president of a foreign exchange firm, said he's the youngest person in his building — most residents are retired — and the blue-collar neighborhood around the building is safe at night.

In St. George, "if you walk out after 10 p.m. you'll get mugged," he said, noting that at many of the island's lower-priced condos, "it's a free-for-all — drug dealers, prostitutes, just a lot of bad elements."

Riccardi continued, "my neighborhood, it's an old, blue-collar neighborhood. People know each other."

Still, Staten Island's market is generally more sought out for its single-family homes with yards in a suburban setting, which are far more attainable price-wise here than anywhere else in the city.

Dawn Carpenter, president of the Staten Island Board of Realtors, who manages some 1,000 condominiums, said her condo buyers are generally empty nesters, young couples and singles who are attracted to the condo lifestyle, particularly the part that requires no outdoor maintenance.

Until recently, Staten Island had constantly ranked as the city's fastest-growing borough, growth fueled by the completion of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in 1964. With the increase in population, now approaching 500,000, came the demand for more multi-family housing.

However, condo production in Staten Island topped off long before the other boroughs, which continued to see a consistent number of offering plans filed with the Department of State into the second quarter of this year.

According to the department, Staten Island developers filed offering plans for 443 co-op and condo units between 2004 and 2006. Developers filed plans for only 41 units from 2007 through the second quarter of this year.

And, according to the city's Department of Buildings, in 2006 new building permits dropped by 43 percent compared to the previous year.

Bill Staniford, CEO of Property Shark, said Staten Island's market has suffered the most in recent years because of decreased demand coupled with one of the highest rates of foreclosure.

Carpenter added that foreclosures are particularly troubling in condominium developments because the lower price of a distressed sale is more likely to affect neighboring property values, and a distressed seller often leaves outstanding common charges unpaid.

But she said the worst may have passed. "We're holding our own here in Staten Island. We've leveled off, so we're in a good position. We believe the correction is over," she said.

Jane Kilcullen, a homemaker, lives with her husband, a construction worker, in the borough's sixth-most expensive condo, also in Port Regálle. She said financial troubles led the bank to take over the project, which has since been re-started by another developer, but some promised amenities, such as the pool, still haven't been built.

Residents still have first dibs on the development's private boat slips, which are then often rented out.

Despite the project's troubles, Kilcullen, a former lifelong Brooklynite, said she loves her townhouse's spectacular view of Great Kills Harbor and the neighborhood steeped in Italian culture.

They don't plan to move anytime soon, which is a good plan, according to Staniford, who said the borough is still due for a 10 to 15 percent correction that would take at least five years to work itself out.