Spare Me: 204 Washington Avenue

You know how McDonalds brought back the McRib? And there was some anticipation & hype surrounding it, as if some people were really looking forward to it? But you were just like, "I didn't eat that junk before, I'm certainly not eating it now!" ??



Well, 204 Washington is back. This 3-Family brownstone in Clinton Hill first came on the scene last spring for $1.25M and it had lots of potential. Pretty nice interior, tall ceilings, and a good layout make the most of the 16' wide frame giving it an open feel. And this is a nice block close to Myrtle and not far from the G train, for what it's worth.

Rental income in this neighborhood has really come a long way, and Massey Knakal's set-up provided pro-forma numbers that reflected that rental income potential. But all it was WAS potential. The numbers they provided were much higher than the actual rents. The building couldn't be delivered vacant and our agreed-to price was irrelavent. This rendered the listing useless too. Owners then took the listing down & re-up'd the leases for the tenants, for 2 years.

So seeing this thing back out on the market for $50K less, and with tenants on all five floors paying below-market rent until August 2012, exhibiting no intentions of ever leaving... what the H? If you thought 33 Cambridge had a tenant taking up most of the house until August 2012, all five floors of 204 Washinton are spoken for, for another 16 months. This essentially isn't even a listing and it's goofy just to see it back out on the market. It's kinda sad too, 'cause it's a great place. The owners are sitting on lots of value. And it makes a great place for buyers in that FHA range with very little downpayment. But what good is a genie in the bottle if you can't get the genie out? If the owners had any intention of delivering this thing vacant in order to extract that full value, they would have already sold it to us last year for the price both sides had already agreed to with the assumption it would be delivered vacant.

Pro's: maximized layout, fairly turn-key, nice block, Myrtle's close, G train's close

Con's: 16' wide, has a few fix-it issues, exterior crumbling in places, city trains are far, oh yeah - and nobody else can live in it for 16 months at the soonest

Ideally: We're not quite seeing who's paying "genie out of the bottle" prices now after it's been locked up for two more years.