Tony townhouses hitting the market
Townhouse for sale! These days, that sign is a common sight on West 11th Street in Manhattan.
In 2017, the quaint West Village block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues — in a tony area long known as the Gold Coast — had no townhouses for sale. Currently, seven are on the market, according to StreetEasy data provided to The Post.
The rise in the number of listings has been steady. Coincidence? Maybe not.
“From zero to seven is a trend line — not an idiosyncrasy,” said Jonathan Miller, president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. And he suspects the increase results from macroeconomic forces: goings-on in the financial markets, changes to the Fed’s monetary policy and uncertainty about the November presidential election.
The numbers are small — and “the townhouse market is a very distinct luxury subset,” Miller said — but after the pandemic, when interest rates started to rise, listings started piling up.
Manhattan’s townhouses are hardly aimed toward the typical buyer. Overall, prices of the West 11th Street townhouses currently listed are in the $10 million to $20 million range.
‘Overpriced’
Do the wealthy buyers of such high-end properties care about interest rates? Yes and no. It’s not about affording the mortgage, Miller said — but “for many people in the wealth strata that can buy these, their income or occupation has a lot to do with the health of the financial markets. They are concerned about future economic headwinds.”
What’s more, Miller said, these properties may be overpriced.
“They are priced as if it’s 2021 when we had a frenzy, and as a result these properties are sticking around and the inventory is rising.
This inventory is not priced for current conditions.”
Among the current options for sale: No. 21, which the New School university listed early this year for $20 million amid a budget deficit. The months since have seen three subsequent price cuts for the 4,038-square-foot property, according to its StreetEasy listing page, with its ask standing at $12 million as of July 10. No. 38, meanwhile, relisted in July 2021 for $19 million; after three rounds of discounts, StreetEasy also shows, it’s now listed for $12.95 million.
“It’s not like someone opened a nightclub or there is some adverse eternal locational element that impairs the marketability,” Miller said. “This seems like a macroeconomic condition. The Village has a high concentration of townhouses, and so the odds are that it would be more likely to occur in a neighborhood like this.”
A similar phenomenon is occurring in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with a cluster of nine townhouses currently on the market. The priciest — a British Regency-style mansion — would set a record for the prime neighborhood if it sells for its asking price, $18 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. (A few townhouses in Brooklyn Heights — a neighborhood much closer to Manhattan — have recently sold for more.)
If the $18 million Park Slope house were in the West Village, “it would be a $30 million to $35 million house,” the listing agent, David Feldman of Brown Harris Stevens, told the Journal.
Last winter, a double-wide townhouse at 138-140 W. 11th St. — standing just one block west of Sixth Avenue — set a record for the priciest downtown townhouse sale, at $72.5 million. It was once a rental building in terrible shape. The Journal reported that the buyer is a retired couple from out of state planning to use the 12,000square-foot home as a pied-à-terre.