Sunday, March 31, 2013

The Carriage Trade: 91 Irving Place




Not on your StreetEasy or NYTimes, but on Platinum Member radar the day it came out,  91 Irving Street is a carriage house in Clinton Hill just off of Fulton Street that's begging to be decked out.  Agents invited us to their first showing of the property, and we liked what we saw.  Modest & totally decent as-is, we see someone making a project out of it.  There’s room for that “sky’s the limit” pricing if you make something nice over here.  Take those adjacent carriage houses that Corcoran had asking $3M at 410-412 Waverly Avenue - and got it.  Maybe you didn’t know that pimped-out brownstones fetch well over $2M just around the corner nowadays like 396 Grand Avenue, or 377 Grand Avenue, or 91 Cambridge, or even a fixer-upper like 56 Cambridge.  Or you thought that price was still only reserved for Park Slope?  The switch from Park Slope to Clinton Hill was good enough for Vinny Chase, but some folks still don't think it's good enough for them.  You know how some people in these parts think.




Yes, before the automobile, the wealthy built Clinton Hill to live in big mansions, and they needed carriage houses to stick their horse & buggies.  You see them all over, including nearby Fort Greene and even Brooklyn Heights.  Platinum Members took down a great opportunity on this block in Manhattan where the carriage trade brought ballers and baller housing.  This isn't the first time seeing a carriage house for this price range in Clinton Hill.  There are a few over there on Waverly.  They often lack the original details of housing, but offer a unique space to play with.  91 Irving has a curb cut in the front, high ceilings, exposed brick, 3 original stoves...








 

The biggest drawback is obviously there’s no yard, but with some 3,200 buildable square feet on a 20' x 60' floor plate, you should have plenty of room to do some nice decks & skylights.  The list price of $1.3M is hard to peg precisely, because we’re in end-user territory, so it's anyone's guess where this lands.  There won't BE another 71 Irving Place, so don't let that factor into your pricing.  And it's not like a high-end rental is impossible here, just not likely to be profitable.

Compare it to what some other carriage houses have gone for over here.  Walk to single story space across the street from 71 Irving to see how quickly a little styling can bougiefy a space.

Pro’s: 
turnkey now, buildable square feet, nice canvas to improve on, solidifying location

Con’s:
  will take a budget to finish it out, no real yard at all, not a rental income beast, questions over complications with zoning & financing

Ideally:
  can't wait to see what happens...

1 comment: