Park Slope Pre-Market: Lincoln Place

On Platinum Member radar for months, Halstead will soon bring you a 4-story Park Slope brownstone with an extra-deep lot between 6th and 7th Avenues.  The house is just 17' wide, though since it's a 2-Family with separate entrances and has a lot that's even deeper than 213 Prospect Place, there should be plenty of buildable square footage if someone wants to get really frisky and build an extension.  Look no further than a winner like 117 Berkeley Place to see what a narrow 2-Family with a nice yard in Park Slope is capable of.  While the interior is nothing as nice as 117 Berkeley, we're told the asking price here on Lincoln Place will be $2.3M.  Corcoran had the owner gassed up for a little while talking about fetching as much as $2.6M, but ultimately Halstead won for other reasons.

Yes, that's another little dirty secret about the biz, that brokers will inflate prospective seller's expectations about price just to land an exclusive, then happily be the bearers of relatively bad news when "the market has spoken" and that inflated price doesn't come in.  Call it "over-promise, under-deliver."  It costs them nothing, so it's pretty standard practice.  Sellers will often gravitate towards whomever is painting the rosiest picture, and who can blame them?  So it's a positive feedback loop of negative reciprocity that breeds the dishonesty and distrust rampant between brokers, buyers, and sellers alike.  We've seen brokers in Bed-Stuy tell owners with a straight face that they can get them $1.2M (in an attempt to land an exclusive), then walk upstairs moments later and ask us in confidence, "Who would pay over $950K for this?!?"  To be fair, some sellers are no saints either and have their own equivalent of this trick too.  Whaddya gonna do?  "It's a bad man's world."

We can't put an exact time line on when this listing will be out.  We've been scoping it since March ourselves.  Properties are available pre-market all the time for various reasons that are often too nuanced for the novices to understand at first glance.  One big reason is that no seller wants to pay 6% commission unless they have to.  Another reason is, listing brokers love to keep all of that 6% commission for themselves and sell it to their own buyer without ever actually bringing it to market (even if it breaks their fiduciary responsibility to the seller).  Ahem, see 1310 Pacific Street that could've sold for as much as $250K higher.  In fact, as we speak, Platinum Members are scoping a handful of off-market opportunities in Prospect Heights, Fort Greene, and Clinton Hill that you won't find on NYTimes, Streeteasy, Trulia, or Zillow unless (or until) the big brokers get to them.  Which won't happen in the first place if a reasonable offers gets to them first.


Pro's:  Park Slope brownstone, extra-deep yard, width isn't a dealbreaker with this 2-Family configuration, chance to scope it out pre-market

Con's:  needs lots of updates to reach its maximum potential, get ready for a North Slope bidding war

Ideally:  if you know where to look, you can intercept some of these deals before everyone else shows up