Developers increasingly shun one-bedroom apartments

 Already scarce, one-bedroom apartments may soon become a thing of the past in new developments.

Developers are beginning to phase one-bedroom apartments out of their new buildings, motivated by demand for big spaces and in order to better capitalize on their investment.

“I don’t know that one-bedrooms will ever become extinct, but I think the nature of the city is changing,” Taconic Investment Partners CEO Charles Bendit, who developed Sterling Mason, a once-stalled 32-unit condo project at 71 Laight Street in Tribeca that has no one-bedroom apartments but 14 three-bedroom units, told the New York Times.

“Young kids aren’t leaving as quickly as they once did, and people who are making an investment are investing in a family home,” Bendit added.

Moreover, research from the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group shows that at the start of January there were just 104 one-bedroom apartments for sale in new Manhattan condo buildings, out of a total of 654 units – a 16 percent share. Compare that to January 2012, when there were 194 one-bedroom apartmentss for sale out of 718 units — a 27 percent share.

And the decline doesn’t show any signs of stopping, according to the Times.

“It’s not that there is no demand for one-bedrooms,” Miller Samuel president Jonathan Miller said. “It’s that there is no demand for one-bedrooms at $4,000 a foot, which would make some of these sites feasible.” [NYT] –Christopher Cameron