Apartments along the Second Avenue subway may come with displaced rats, the din of jackhammers and unsightly piles of construction debris, but how about a discount?
The savings might be small, but apartment seekers are, as ever, hopeful, The Journal reports.
The median sale price for condos and co-ops along the Second Avenue construction zone declined 8 percent between 2007 and 2011, (it’s now $650,000), but besides the many annoyances of living among the construction during those years there’s also been a housing market crash and a recession, so it’s hard to put all the blame on the subway line.
But armed with anecdotal evidence, brokers agree that the ongoing work could knock several thousand, maybe even tens of thousands, of dollars off an asking price. And, if residents are willing to put up with shaking buildings and torn-up sidewalks, they’ll probably see a nice reversal of fortunes when the line is done, whenever that is. (Construction is expected to finish in 2016, but deadlines have not been a strong suit for this project, which was begun in 1929.)
“It’s almost like taking your cod-liver oil,” Jonathan Miller, chief executive of real-estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel Inc. told The Journal.
Among the bargain-hunters interviewed was a 72-year-old woman who took advantage of a $30,000 discount to upgrade from a studio to a one-bedroom in the same building where she’d been living for the past eight years. The woman said she wasn’t bothered by the racket, but we expect she’s inured to the misery by now.
And renters, who must suffer the headaches of living in a construction site without any hope of the investment paying off, may find the craziest bargains of all.
But whether buying or renting, brokers agree that the best deal—if you could call them that— are to be found in muck-house abutting apartments and lower-level units exposed to largest amounts of dust, noise and angry rats.
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