Brooklyn native Margaret Cuonzo spent a year wrangling with banks to take possession of her townhouse at 50 Duffield Street in Downtown Brooklyn.In the current market, home purchases — even at the lower end of the price spectrum — can be just as hairy as commercial real estate deals.
Brooklyn native Margaret Cuonzo, for example, got a steal on her recent purchase of 50 Duffield Street, the three-family Downtown Brooklyn townhouse she is currently renovating. According to city records, she paid $705,000 — “basically, the price of a condo in one of the nicer buildings [in the area],” said Cuonzo, who teaches philosophy at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University.
But it took nearly a year of wrangling with banks to take possession of the house, despite the fact that Cuonzo is “more than qualified” to buy it, said Jacqui Howard Sicignano, a salesperson at the Corcoran Group who represented the seller.
“I was putting down a big down payment, and still I went through hell,” said Cuonzo, who is hoping to move in this November.
Sicignano first listed the 4,200-square-foot house, between Tillary and Concord Streets, in the fall of 2009. The owner, an 82-year-old woman, had lived there since the 1960s, but when her husband died, “financially, [she] couldn’t keep up the house anymore,” Sicignano said. Because the seller was strapped for cash and didn’t have money for staging or even a new coat of paint, Sicignano had to show the rapidly deteriorating property “as is.”
“I really had to work with what I had — I really was relying on the location and the price,” recalled Sicignano, who priced the property at $750,000.
During the first open-house in October 2009, some 60 people arrived to find gaping holes in the walls, floors and ceilings. Urine-soaked newspapers blanketed the third floor, where the owner’s son lived with several pit bulls. During the open house, Sicignano confined the dogs to the garden, but every time a potential buyer walked by, “the pit bulls would start jumping up and down and growling,” recalled Cuonzo, who attended the open house after spotting the listing online.
At that point, Cuonzo had been looking to buy real estate for about two years. Raised in Bath Beach at the borough’s southern tip, she’d purchased a one-bedroom co-op at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1998, and then sold it at 2007 — at the zenith of the boom. The profit from the sale eventually became the down payment for her purchase at 50 Duffield.
Like most visitors at the open house that day, Cuonzo said she was appalled by the condition of the home. The bricks in front of the building had settled in an outward bulge so that “the house actually looked pregnant,” she recalled.
But “for some reason, I was able to see through all those things,” she said. “I had a sense of what it would be.”
Plus, it was located on a pleasant block only 10 minutes from her university job.
After mulling it over for a few days, Cuonzo put in an offer, and she and the seller negotiated a price. Cuonzo even agreed to lease one of the apartments back to the seller once the house was renovated. Surprisingly, that’s when the real challenges began.
“At that time in the lending world, it was really difficult,” Sicignano said, recalling that the process of getting a mortgage was “long and grueling.”
“They asked for all this crazy documentation,” Cuonzo said. She had to write a letter explaining her reasons for buying the house. Then, inexplicably, she had to supply proof that her current apartment — a rental on the seventh floor of a residential building — wasn’t “a bar, restaurant or nightclub.” She was also asked to prove she didn’t have a mortgage on a small cabin she owns upstate. Since Cuonzo bought the cabin with cash, she didn’t know how to proceed. “How can I prove a negative?” she remembers thinking.
Then, when appraisers visited the house, they deemed it to be in “below average condition,” Sicignano said. As a result, the bank refused to approve the loan.
At that point, Cuonzo was having second thoughts about the wisdom of the purchase. Luckily, “Jacqui is very calming,” Cuonzo said.
For her part, Sicignano was pouring hours and hours each week into making the deal happen, despite the fact that she had other clients. “I was really taking it on like it was a full-time job,” she said. When the deal finally closed, she was rewarded — literally — with REBNY’s Residential Deal of the Year award for 2010.
But in order to make that happen, Cuonzo ended up having to send contractors into the house to repair the ceiling and pipes, even before she’d purchased it.
“I had to send contractors into the house to do some repairs in order to get the financing in place,” she said. “That was a risky thing to do, because you’re basically renovating someone’s house for them.”
With those repairs finished, she was finally able to get a mortgage, and the deal closed last May. There were more obstacles to come; the seller and her sons didn’t move out until September, and when they finally did leave, the carpets were swarming with fleas left by the pit bulls.
At last, Cuonzo was able to start a $250,000 renovation on the house. She’s hoping to move in by November — in which case, she really will have something to celebrate on Turkey Day.
“Thankfully, it all worked out in the end,” she said.