Award-Winning Heights House Sells
[nggallery id=”54151″ template=galleryview] Shortly after 28 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights hit the market in November ’09, it was a House of the Day and listed for $4,200,000. The property ended up selling for $3,000,000 in a transaction recorded in city records earlier this week. Back when it was first listed, The Eagle ran a…
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Shortly after 28 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights hit the market in November ’09, it was a House of the Day and listed for $4,200,000. The property ended up selling for $3,000,000 in a transaction recorded in city records earlier this week. Back when it was first listed, The Eagle ran a profile of its owner and his renovation of the four-story property, which resulted in the Brooklyn Heights Association’s 2006 Award for Architectural Excellence. (The old listing photos above show some of the interior.) The seller had this to say about the house’s condition pre-renovation: “‘Sometime after 1940, someone removed the front stairway, added asbestos shingles, created a side entry and added a two-car garage. In their mind they probably thought they were modernizing it, but it looked horrible.'” The seller reduced the size of the garage, extended the back of the house, and used the top two floors as a two-bedroom rental. Also of interest on this one is its history on the market: According to StreetEasy, it saw a bunch of price cuts through June of last year; was de-listed in August; and re-emerged with a $3,250,000 price tag last September.
House of the Day: 28 Middagh Street [Brownstoner]
Award-Winning Heights Home on Market for $4.2M [Eagle]
BoerumResident: it sounds like you should be working for Brownstoner with all those excellent ideas for expanding his revenue stream.
bkhts2 — I disagree. Although there were clearly outliers, there was a signficant consensus on the board that the mean average determined was consistently 12-18% below the final sale price. I am not a statistician, but that sounds like a robust finding to me. I am with Maly — I thought it provided strong information to both buyers and sellers. More importantly, there was probably more valuable information lurking in analyses like the median (or probably the 75/25 cut off.)
Of course, what Brownstoner should do is bring back the widget and then offer (for a modest fee) Marketplace advertisers more in depth information about the data he collects from the widget. (Obviosuly, this could be buried in the terms of service for us but I think it might be better to actually emphasize it from a community empowerment point of view — “See your opinions actually do matter.”) Imagine if it turns out that certain posters really have a feel for their neighborhood — e.g., for Brooklyn Heights, Biff Champion or Minard can nail the final sale price within 2%, Bob Marvin knows Lefferts, etc., someone else really has a feel for Park Slope apartments, etc. I think that type of information would be gold to a sales agent (or radioactive perhaps) and certainly very useful when presenting offers to a client. E.g., if only low bids have come in and the agent independently believes that there are better buyers out there, independent confirmation (or contradiction) of such information could really be useful for the seller and their agent.
The Eagle story says the owner is an interior architect who did the redesign. The exterior clearly reflects that.
I disagree that “there is no way that tall brick basement dates to [the nineteenth century].” Lots of the other frame houses in the immediate surrounding blocks are on high brick basements. By far the more simple explanation is that they were built that way, not that they were all jacked up.
There are pictures at the historical society, and the Brooklyn and New York public libraries, of these Middagh Street houses from 1890s-1920s. This house had the same high basement back then.
Anyway the house is older than 1829.
The widget was also influenced by people’s raw emotions. Owners of real estate had an incentive to put in phoney high numbers and those who rent and are bitter about high real estate prices had incentives to place low numbers. The only real numbers that count are very recent contract signings of comparable properties and, more importantly, actual bids that properties receive from real live buyers. Those participating in “widgets” have no skin in the game, so its easy to put any old number that suits their mood or agenda.
north heights, you’re right. There is some research on the older houses in Clay Lancaster’s book. According to Mr Lancaster,page 117 of the second edition, 28 Middagh is a “3-storied frame house listed in the 1829 city directory” “It was built for John McManus, shipmaster.”
There is no way that tall brick basement dates to 1829.
The house looked like the one next door (listed in the 1824 directory) with a very low brick basement until it was raised a story, I’m guessing in the 1920’s.
Northheights, I know what the house looked like in 1965 but what did it look like in 1905? I think the basement was added, jacking up frame houses was not unusual.
Snark, cadavre exquis? I’m at a dead loss.
Minard, the renovated facade is pretty similar to the original facade, minus the stoop and plus the garage. It was never the same as the grey house next door. You can see this by looking at the tax photo and other historic photos.
Not true that there’s no research on these houses.
It would make sense if you knew what an “exquisite corpse” is.
“Among Surrealist techniques exploiting the mystique of accident was a kind of collective collage of words or images called the cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse). Based on an old parlor game, it was played by several people, each of whom would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution.”