Five-year Harlem resident Asha Rubin works in television production, is expecting her second child and is about to head north. She’s in contract to purchase the most expensive townhouse ever sold in the South Bronx.
“I’m from California, and I want to move into a real home rather than an apartment, because that’s what I grew up with,” said Rubin, who is buying a townhouse at 293 Alexander Avenue in Mott Haven that was listed at $780,000. “Unfortunately for me, I’m breaking a record in the neighborhood.”
Fortunately for investors, however, there are plenty of townhouses to buy in Mott Haven, most of which cost significantly less than the average Manhattan condo. And if the South Bronx’s reputation isn’t exactly lustrous, it’s certainly being burnished.
The media have rushed to play up a comeback kid storyline, calling attention to a drop in crime, convenient subway access and affordable housing options.
Real estate agents who cover the area say it offers value compared to Harlem.
“The house next to 293 Alexander Avenue needs to be completely gut renovated, and it sold last year for $350,000,” said Allison Jaffe, an agent with Skyline Realty. “This shell of a house on a comparable street in Harlem would be at least $750,000.”
Jaffe, who has sold over a dozen houses in Mott Haven since 2003, said three years ago the record price for a three-story, brick townhouse in the neighborhood was $365,000. She now regularly sees similar listings in the mid-$400,000 to $500,000 range.
The townhouse Rubin is buying is unique for the area in that it’s recently undergone a luxury renovation.
“You’re generally not going to find any townhouses in pristine condition like in Harlem,” said Rhan Ferdinand, an agent at Halstead’s West Side Office. “They’re all going to need some work.”
So if you’re sold on investing in a South Bronx property, what can you buy, and what’s it going to cost to fix up?
The three people profiled here purchased townhouses in Mott Haven’s historic district, which has the largest stock of townhouses in the South Bronx (see below). While they all consider their properties sound investments, they’ve used a range of renovation tactics at varied costs.
The do-it-yourselfer
Robert Vargas is the force behind 293 Alexander Avenue’s record price tag. He purchased the property with his wife and mother six years ago for $88,000. They’ve used it as their primary residence, with Vargas and his wife living on the bottom stories and Vargas’ mother living on the top two floors.
“It needed a gut renovation, and I went through two contractors over the course of a year,” said Vargas. “They were both doing choppy-chop jobs, so I fired them.”
Vargas said the first contractor attempted to frame around compromised floor joints without addressing them, while the second piled garbage in the yard and didn’t dispose of it.
“I’ve always been handy, so I started to fix the top two floors myself,” said Vargas, who ended up spending the next five years renovating the house. He used to be a professional singer but the house precipitated a career shift; he now works full-time as a contractor.
“As you move from the top to the bottom of the house, the features and fixtures get more expensive, and the quality of work improves because I was getting more experienced as I went along,” he said.
He estimates that he spent over $300,000 on the renovations, which included buying and installing bathroom appliances, oak floors, porcelain tiles and track lighting. He also rewired the entire house.
“I put in custom-made oak doors throughout the house, and they cost $30,000,” said Vargas. “The front door alone, which was 100 years old and had to be completely stripped, cost $15,000.”
Vargas and his family are currently planning to find a new house elsewhere in the Bronx to renovate.
“I need a new project,” he said.
The landlords
Inna Sobel and her husband own two townhouses in Mott Haven. They purchased the first, at 304 Alexander Avenue, for $270,000 three years ago. The second, at 295 Alexander Avenue, cost them $345,000 when they bought it two years ago, and they have yet to begin renovations on it.
“The one we bought first, which needed much less work, also cost a lot less,” said Sobel, who is an agent at Manhattan Apartments Inc. “When we purchased the first property, the area was just starting to get noticed.”
The Sobels spent six months renovating 304 Alexander Avenue. They divided the two-family house into four apartments, and the units now bring $4,450 a month in rent.
The renovations included changing the locations of bathrooms, redoing the electrical wiring and waterproofing the house.
Sobel said they spent $80,000, but the renovations were worth much more because Sobel’s father was their contractor and a friend who did the wood restoration offered deep discounts.
In addition to the two townhouses in the South Bronx, the Sobels own four buildings in Harlem where they also rent out units.
“It used to be a better investment to buy in the South Bronx, but now that’s getting just as expensive as Harlem,” said Sobel. “The rents you can get in Mott Haven don’t support what they’re asking for the buildings, while you can get much higher rents in Harlem.”
Sobel advises prospective buyers to “crunch numbers” before purchasing in the South Bronx.
“If you’re just converting the houses to rental units, it might not pan out,” she said. “If you’re going to live in the house, though, and also rent out units, it might be a good investment.”
Renovating with a green thumb
Ariane Randall bought her landmarked, three-family house at 429 East 139th Street in Mott Haven last October for $405,000.
“It’s a great investment, I get to have a garden, and the building is aesthetically pleasing,” said Randall, a chiropractor who grew up on the Upper West Side.
Randall rents out apartments on the second and third floors and lives in the apartment’s ground-floor unit. She has renovated her apartment and the garden area but doesn’t have immediate plans to renovate the top two levels.
The renovations involved installing new floorboards, expanding a closet, updating the kitchen and redoing the bathroom. She paid a contractor $3,000 to install the bamboo floors, which cost $3.85 a square foot, and a crew $2,000 to haul away construction debris that had been left in the basement and under the garden deck from the prior owner’s 1992 renovations.
Randall tried to incorporate green building techniques into the renovations, installing full spectrum lights as well as the bamboo floors. She also used non-toxic paints because “the South Bronx has enough pollution problems.”
Randall said using green materials isn’t prohibitively expensive: Bamboo floors cost the same as oak, and non-toxic paints are only about $2 more a gallon than regular paint. She purchased supplies from Environmental Construction Outfitters in Port Morris.
Randall’s next step is to renovate the house’s façde, and she is applying for federal grants to start the work. The rents her tenants pay, $975 and $1,050, are over the limit set by the city’s Historic Preservation Grant Program, so she is only eligible for matching funds.
Randall said the building’s landmark status has caused unforeseen hassles with contractors and makes renovations pricier.
“It’s very difficult to get a written, itemized estimate for work out of contractors, which you need to apply for the grants,” she said. “Even if I don’t get a grant, the [Landmarks Preservation Commission] has to approve the windows I want to install, and what they require costs a lot more than standard renovations.”
What you can get and where you can get it
The South Bronx’s greatest concentration of townhouses is in the Mott Haven Historic District, which includes Alexander Avenue from 137th to 141st streets and 139th and 140th streets between Willis and Brook avenues.
Most of the houses are about 100 years old. When they were built, Alexander Avenue was known as both the Irish Fifth Avenue and Doctors Row. The historic district is only a few blocks from the 138th Street subway stop and the 40th Precinct house, which add to its current appeal.
“The stock of historic townhouses is a small cache compared to Harlem,” said Adrian Thompkins, an agent at the Corcoran Group who sold the townhouse at 293 Alexander Avenue with his fellow Corcoran agent Shebrelle Hunter-Green (see above). “There are only about 300 landmarked townhouses in the South Bronx.”
Aside from the historic townhouses, a number of new townhouses are being built in Mott Haven and neighboring Port Morris, and there are many rental buildings in the area. There are also giant housing projects that, to some extent, dominate the neighborhood’s character.
What the neighborhood really needs, according to local agents, are condo developments.
“The call I get most is from people looking for condos,” said Allison Jaffe, an agent at Skyway Realty. “But nobody is doing them.”
Condos may come in due time, though.
“When developers start coming in and constructing condos, that’ll be the next step,” said Thompkins. “That’s what the neighborhood desperately needs, because it will bring in single people and artists.”