As prices rise in Brooklyn, brokers in Bedford-Stuyvesant have been breaking sales records left and right since March.
In a sign of how hot the neighborhood’s become, nine of Bed-Stuy’s top 15 residential sales in the past five years are from 2014, according to data from Property Shark. Meanwhile, the median sales price during the second quarter rose to $630,000, up from $425,000 in the second quarter of 2013. In June of this year, the median asking price was even higher, according to StreetEasy data: $895,000, a 50.4 percent increase from June 2013.
“Last year, I had a house on the market and I thought it was aggressively priced at $1.42 million,” said Halstead Property broker Morgan Munsey, who lives and works in Bed-Stuy. “The lowest offer I got was $1.6 million and it went for over $1.8 million.”
In June, Munsey co-brokered the $2.25 million sale of 22 Arlington Place, which shares the distinction of being Bed-Stuy’s top residential sale with 96 Quincy Street, which also sold in June. “That surprised me even, with the price,” he said, of the Arlington Place deal.
Munsey said $1.8 million has become “the new asking price” for four-story brownstones in Bed-Stuy, as buyers push further into Brooklyn looking for relative bargains. “As long as the tonier areas like Park Slope and Fort Greene and Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill have $4- and $5-million houses, this is still a deal here in Bed-Stuy,” he said.
Meanwhile, opportunistic sellers are profiting from a hot market, which has rebounded from 2008 and 2009 when the neighborhood had a high foreclosure rate. “There were tons [of properties] that people were just getting on the steps of the courts in Downtown Brooklyn,” noted Douglas Elliman broker Jerry Minsky. Now, he said, sellers are listing their homes “because the iron’s hot.”
Below are the top 10 residential sales in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the past 12 months, according to Property Shark.