A Woman Finds Her Ideal UWS Home At a Modest Price

Welcome to It Happened One Weekend, our weekly roundup of The New York Times real estate section...

Every "The Hunt" column begins with the Hunters describing the apartment they want, and ends with them rationalizing whatever they came away with. This is The Hunt: Dreams vs. Reality.

The Hunter: Jamie Koff, owner of Fabric to Finish

Price

Dream: $600,000 to $800,000

Reality: $699,000

Neighborhood

Dream: Upper West Side

Reality: Manhattan Valley

Amenities

Dream: Doorman, elevator, and great lighting

Reality: Part-time doorman, roof deck

Summary

For the majority of her time in New York, Jamie Koff has called the Upper West Side her home. As her one-bedroom West 83rd Street apartment’s rent rose to over $3,000 per month, she began exploring her options. Koff had plans of buying a place with her parents, but that dream never manifested as her parents both became ill and passed away.

Realizing she would have to do it on her own, Koff reached out to a friend at Halstead Property to help her find a spacious one- or two-bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side. She quickly found that the units in her preferred area that fit her price range of $600,000 to $800,000 were less than ideal conditions, having bedrooms that were too small along with "poor lighting and no views." She wanted a doorman and an elevator and ground-floor apartments were out of the question.

Koff looked at a one-bedroom unit on West 72nd Street in a 1925 building that was asking $749,000 with a monthly maintenance of $1,435 but it would require too much fixing up thus making the asking price too high. Next, Friedman led Koff further uptown to a one-bedroom co-op near West 95th Street, on West End Avenue, which had a view of the Riverside-West End Historic District. She offered $775,000 for the $785,000 apartment and they accepted but she was later turned down by the building’s co-op board presumably due to her fluctuating income.

Koff finally found the place for her. It was everything that she wanted and more. It came in the form of a one-bedroom, 750-square-foot apartment with a roof deck in Manhattan Valley. The asking price was $699,00 with a monthly maintenance fee that was less than $1,000. It needed some work, but that was okay since Koff found the asking price to be fairly low. After getting approval from the board, Koff paid the asking price and got to work on kitchen and bathroom modifications as well as a much needed paint job.

• Upper West Side One-Bedroom, Just Needs Paint [The New York Times]

from
http://ny.curbed.com/2016/5/28/11805266/a-woman-finds-her-ideal-uws-home-at-a-modest-price-