It’s an old New York story: Man stumbles upon fixer-upper. He struggles to come up with the down payment. He expends blood, toil and tears renovating the property. He rents out the bottom floors and keeps an apartment for himself and his family at the top.
But this same story is now drawn on a much richer (and we mean that in more than one sense) canvas.
Indeed, there are some ambitious developers who have created their dream home — with a handful of dream apartments below their pad that they’ve wound up selling for millions.
Ramon Maislen is making an attempt at such a score.
In 2012, Maislen came across a property on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Second Street in Park Slope that set his imagination aflame.
“The building itself could have easily been transported to Paris and you’d never know it didn’t belong,” says Maislen. “It’s a corner building with a tremendous amount of character.”
The roughly century-old brick building had little terraces with wrought-iron railings that mimic Juliet balconies, and limestone around the windows. The purchase price was $3.75 million.
“It was an eight-unit rental [with two apartments per floor] that had been converted to seven units, with one floor combined,” says Maislen.
As he began the gutting process, Maislen tore down a wall and realized he could see from one side of the building to the other. He let his imagination fill in all the multiple bedrooms and spaces.
“I envisioned how good it would look as a floor-through apartment — and we wanted a place to live for ourselves with our growing family,” says Maislen. “I thought, I know there’s a lot of similarly like-minded people in the same situation.”
And as Maislen continued the renovation, he found his emotions beginning to overwhelm him.
“The more time I spent in the building the more I fell in love with the building itself — I said to my wife, ‘We have to take one of these units.’ ”
A year and a half later came the finished product: a condo called Bennett House, which will consist of five units when it goes on the market within the next month. The ground floor and the basement will house two duplex apartments, and the remaining three units will be full-floor, four-bedroom apartments of just under 1,700 square feet each. As for the top floor, the Maislens are taking it for themselves.
Despite — or perhaps because of — the DIY job, the Maislen pulled out all the stops on the finished product. There are Calacatta marble counters that run $7,000 per slab, wide-plank ash flooring and a green roof deck with around 700 square feet of common space. (Plus another 700 square feet or so of private space for himself on the roof.)
For Park Slope condos, Bennett House is reaching for a very high price point: units are around $2.5 million — less expensive than a townhouse in good condition, but a lot pricier than many of the neighborhood’s offerings. According to Jonathan Miller of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, the average sales price for a condo in Park Slope in the first quarter of this year was $1,061,897.
“I think he just really cares about the product that he’s building,” says Eric Sidman, a broker with Town, who is marketing Bennett House. Sidman notes that because Maislen and family are living there, “it helps solidify the decision to spend extra money on sound insulation or tiles — all the extras that he’s done. These are going to be his neighbors, he wants them to be happy.”
When the building is finished, Maislen might realize a small profit — but it will go to his partners on the deal. “I view getting the house as my profit,” Maislen says.
But the process of buying, rehabbing and selling a building doesn’t have to be an unprofitable one.
“It definitely can be profitable,” says developer Hans Futterman, who has ventured in these waters not once, but twice.
Futterman, his wife, Ellen, and kids Aidan, Liam and Max, currently live at 265 W. 122nd St., a four-unit condo building that they developed and moved into in 2008. Prior to that, the family was living in a three-unit townhouse a block away that Futterman had purchased and gutted.
“It has more to do with what the market looks like when you’re going to market than anything else,” says Futterman. “In this case [of West 122nd Street], the equity I kept in my apartment was the majority of the profit.” (The three other apartments in the building sold for $860,000, $865,000 and $1.51 million, according to StreetEasy.) But living in the same building as your developer has a certain appeal to buyers, as well.
“I think it gives people a level of confidence, that you have enough faith in your own product,” says Futterman.
“Our first buyer wanted to make it a condition of the contract that we’re going to live there,” laughs Steven Schnall, the developer of the new six-unit TriBeCa condo that he just unveiled at 15 Leonard.
Indeed, Schnall had already had experience buying, rehabbing, living and (ultimately) selling a property in the neighborhood, on West Broadway, which he traded after the credit crisis.
Back in 2010, Schnall and his wife, Sherri, were roaming the neighborhood looking for another potential rehab job when Sherri stumbled upon this Leonard Street address — it was a pair of one-story commercial garages. And the price was insanely low: $350 per buildable square foot. The six condos went on the market earlier this month with Andrew Azoulay of Town, and have offers on all of them (but one offer has been rejected.) According to StreetEasy, the listing price is $2,573 per square foot.
“It’s definitely going to be a profitable venture,” Schnall says.
As for the Schnalls’ own apartment, it will be something to behold: 7,900 square feet of space for a four-bedroom triplex on the first two floors (plus the basement).
“We’ll have private parking,” says Steven. “That’s one very important amenity. There’ll be a lap pool in the basement. In our TV room, we’ll have a small half-court basketball court — that’s a great perk for the kids. We look at it as the place where our kids’ friends will be able to hang out.”
And while this apartment certainly sounds grand, the rest are pretty impressive, too. “One of the things that was important was that it be of the same level of finishes,” says Steven. “We didn’t want it to be the owners of the building [who] made the Taj Mahal for themselves” and gave everyone else the shaft.
The remaining units are all full floors, with a generous 2,621 square feet of space and four bedrooms each. Prices range from $6.15 million to $7.45 million.
TriBeCa is a kind of clearing house for this sort of activity; developer Zach Vella built a dream house for himself at 1 N. Moore St. (without knowing it at first). It was a six-unit building called 1 N. Moore, on the corner of West Broadway, which Vella built two years ago and sold with Fredrik Eklund and John Gomes at Douglas Elliman.
(Before it was a condo, it was the site of Derek Zoolander’s infamous “gasoline fight accident.”) “You spend so much time creating a project, it’s tough to let it go — especially being a developer,” says Vella, who didn’t decide to purchase a unit until sales got underway. “You end up falling in love with all your projects.”
Of course, developers have been doing a version of this (building their home into a larger one) for ages. James T. Lee (Jacqueline Onassis’ grandfather) built the storied 740 Park Ave. in 1929 and gave himself a double duplex. William Zeckendorf, who built 15 Central Park West, took a 41st-floor apartment — then sold it a few years after for $40 million.
And the phenomenon continues to this day: In the new luxe building on the Upper East Side, the Charles, Ramin Kamfar, the CEO of Bluerock, is taking a 26th-floor apartment.
“We had a certain buyer in mind — and I’m the profile of the buyer,” says Kamfar. “Someone who would live in a townhouse otherwise, but who [wants] the full-service, very high-end amenities. I’ve been in New York 25 years and the ultimate amenity is space.”
At the Charles, the standard floorplate is 3,500 square feet, making it pretty decent, spacewise. (Available units are priced from $6.84 million to $9.88 million.) Of course, Kamfar’s building is a big one with a management company — more often serving as developer and tenant in a building is a phenomenon on a much smaller scale.
“We’re quite friendly with our neighbors,” says Futterman. “Their daughter babysits our kids; we go out to eat — it’s a nice relationship. And that’s important especially with small buildings which are self-managed and not big enough to hire a management company. It’s all about owners of units staying together.”
As it turns out, Futterman’s downstairs neighbors recently decided to expand their family and opt for more space. They put their four-bedroom, 3½-bathroom apartment on the market for $1.995 million.
“We had one open house,” says their neighbor’s broker, Felicia de Chabris of Halstead Property, “and 17 groups showed up.” An offer was accepted at over $2 million. So one can say it’s a profitable relationship, too.