Buyers have returned, bidding wars are raging, and competition is fierce to nab the perfect NYC pad
Late last month, the sales team at 422 W. 20th St., the Brodsky Organization’s new condo building, arrived early to set up for its first open house.
It was Saturday morning at about 8 a.m., and the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing brokers had sunny expectations for this 37-unit building, with units ranging from $670,000 one-bedrooms up to $2.095 million three-bedrooms.
It turns out their best expectations might have been too low. Prospective buyers were lined up outside. By the time they opened their doors at 11:30, 80 people were waiting. More than 700 people came through over the weekend. As of last week, 75 percent of the building was in contract.
Do our eyes deceive us, or is the market strong again?
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The Apex Condominiums had a great two-bedroom layout.
Guy Soreq, a buyer from Tel Aviv who is starting the MBA program at Columbia in the fall, had never set foot in New York City before he began searching for an apartment in Harlem.
But he did enough homework to make his future professors proud.
“I wanted to maintain walking distance from Columbia, so I started to go over the works and did an Excel sheet that calculated the ups and downs [of nearby properties],” Soreq says.
He put size, proximity, taxes and monthly service fees into his spreadsheet and ranked each category with a point system: “It was less a gut feeling, more of a numbers thing.”
Two days after coming to New York to look at the properties that made the cut, Soreq purchased a one-bedroom for approximately $500,000 at the Apex condo building with broker Khadeejah Johnson of the Marketing Directors.
Foreign buyers — like Soreq — are one of the major drivers of the market. CONTINUE READING >>>
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