Residential deals

Brooklyn Heights

$675,000
110 Livingston Street

1-bedroom, 1-bathroom, 927 sf condo in a converted prewar elevator building; 24-hour doorman; concierge; unit has bamboo floors, washer/dryer and Jacuzzi tub; building has fitness center, roof deck, three courtyards; common charges $478 per month; taxes $122 per month; asking price $700,000; 52 weeks on the market. (Brokers: Vanessa van der Linde Brown, City Connections Realty; Jerry Gemignani, Luxor)

“The building is not Fannie Mae-approved, so getting a loan was very difficult and held up the transaction for many months. Fannie and Freddie both wanted a certain amount of money in the building’s reserve, and the building didn’t meet that requirement. We had a signed contract and were looking at other funding sources, but even up to a couple of weeks before we closed, we were considering finding another apartment. Ultimately, Wells Fargo was able to do an exception for my buyers, but it’s still a challenging environment for loans. Banks are very nervous about lending.”

Jerry Gemignani, Luxor

East Village

$1.33 million
296 East 2nd Street

2-bedroom, 2-and-a-half-bathroom, 2,089 sf condo in a new walk-up building; unit is a garden duplex with patio and backyard and has separate entrance for lower level; common charges $1,173 per month; taxes $865 per month; asking price $1.39 million; 22 weeks on the market. (Brokers: Warner Lewis, Ari Harkov, Halstead Property; Brittany Horn, Beatrice Ducrot, Stribling)

“The main challenge with the property had to do with the location on 2nd Street between Avenue C and Avenue D. … It’s relatively far from mass transit. It’s also a ground-floor, subgrade unit, so actually it’s legally only a one-bedroom, even though it’s over 2,000 square feet. It was about finding someone who was okay with having that downstairs room as an office or a bedroom or whatever, even though it doesn’t have any windows. It sold for under $700 per square foot, so basically Brooklyn pricing, because around 40 percent of the square footage is below grade.”

Ari Harkov, Halstead Property

“We had two offers that came in within 48 hours of each other, both all-cash. One was from someone in a German band who thought the below-grade space would be perfect for a sound recording studio, but the people who ended up getting the apartment were an older couple who wanted to use the downstairs space as their bedroom. So it really appealed to two very different kinds of buyers.”

Warner Lewis, Halstead Property

Midtown West

$1.15 million
58 West 58th Street

1-bedroom, 1-bathroom, 900 sf condo in a postwar elevator building (Tower 58); 24-hour doorman; concierge; unit has washer/dryer and balcony with Central Park views; building has roof terrace, laundry and bicycle storage; common charges $1,211 per month; taxes $982 per month; asking price $1.1 million; less than a week on the market. (Brokers: Bill Milvaney, Bellmarc; Dorothy Somekh, Halstead Property)

“The seller wanted to move rather quickly, so we looked at sales in the building in that line, and we found that when they were priced a little on the higher side they tended to languish. It’s on a very high floor and it’s got unusually nice views of Central Park, but we priced it at $1.1 million. I put the listing out there on a Tuesday, showed it five times on Friday and had two all-cash offers by Friday night. It was in contract before the end of that next week. The buyer who got it was someone who lived in the building on a lower floor, who had been waiting for years for a higher-floor apartment with better views to open up. If we had priced it higher, I still believe it would have slowed the process down, and I don’t know that we would have gotten much of a different price, ultimately.”

Bill Milvaney, Bellmarc