Oh, Look: It’s the Most Ridiculously Overpriced Home in Brooklyn
The story of Brooklyn real estate over the last ten years ago is a simple, if depressing one: Prices have gone up. Way, way up. It feels like barely a week goes by without news of a home selling for $15 million in Cobble Hill or some other record being sent for the most ridiculous amount of money people are willing to shell out every month to live in Williamsburg. And we must admit, for the most part, we’ve grown tired of all this real estate chatter. It’s fucking boring when you know the end to a story while you’re still in the middle of it (spoiler: prices will continue to rise and rise, particularly once we being to get the sudden influx of freaked-out-by-the-New Yorker-earthquake-article Seattle- and Portland-dwellers). And yet—AND YET—there are still times when even jaded, ennui-filled assholes like us can still be shocked when it comes to local real estate—particularly when it pertains to something in our very own backyard. (Almost literally.)
Such was the case this morning anyway, when Brooklyn Magazine‘s food editor Sarah Zorn sent us this Gothamist article about a Brooklyn bungalow (pictured above) that’s on the market for $1.25 million. The thing is, we are familiar with this exact house! It is just a couple blocks from where we live in Windsor Terrace, and while it’s a cute anomaly on a block of intermittently ugly (and also sometimes charming) houses, it is also very, very, VERY small. In the official listing (by ubiquitous Windy T real estate-trix Barbara Puccia), the square footage of the house isn’t mentioned, but since the building size is 15×60, we’re talking a 900-square-foot three-bedroom dwelling. This? Is small. The real reason to buy this place, as Puccia mentions, is not the “botanical delight” of a garden which will “completely drench” you as you enter it (hmm), but because the lot itself is much bigger than the house standing on it, so a buyer could build an up-to-three story building and either live in it him- or herself or rent out apartments.
But, c’mon now. Is land in Windsor Terrace really that valuable? Vanderbilt Street isn’t even in the neighborhood’s most desirable school zone anymore! It is served only by the F and G trains. Let me repeat: It is served only by THE F AND G TRAINS.
I will say that the home’s history is an interesting one, as can be read about in this 2008 Real Deal article about it and the owner, Heather Baley. Also of note, in the article, Baley mentions that even though she’d never sell the home (“I’m here until I die… I love this neighborhood. I love this house.”), if she did, she’d put a price on it of $750,000. But things change in seven years, especially when those “things” involve Brooklyn real estate. That’s Brooklyn, we guess. Congratulations seem to be in order to Baley, who, if this home gets its listing price, will be making a profit of over a million dollars since she and her former husband paid only $150,000 for it when they bought it in 1989.
Follow Kristin Iversen on twitter @kmiversen