From Owning to Renting on the UWS; What He Wanted Was We He Got

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: Richard Zoglin

Price

Dream: around $4,000 per month

Reality: $4,025 per month

Neighborhood

Dream: Upper West Side

Reality: Upper West Side

Amenities

Dream: Doorman, Central Air-Conditioning, Gym

Reality: Doorman, Central Air-Conditioning, Gym

Summary

For many years, TIME magazine theater critic and contributing editor, Richard Zoglin, lived in a two-bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side with his late wife, Charla Krupp, a magazine editor and best-selling author of How Not to Look Old. It was purchased for $435,000 in a pre-war 1915 building and over time, the monthly maintenance fee climbed to almost $2,750 per month. The couple wanted to move to someplace new but Krupp was battling breast cancer which she later succumbed to in 2012.

Although grief-stricken from the loss, Zoglin realized that at some point, he needed to pick up the pieces and move forward. Wanting and needing a change, he made the tough decision to sell the co-op he and his wife once shared, listing it for an asking price of $1.595 million, later selling for $1.65 million. He didn’t want to endure the stress of buying a new place, so he searched for rental units instead. He wanted a one-bedroom in a postwar building on the Upper West Side. The place needed to be spacious enough to accommodate his piano and his round dining room table. Zoglin also hoped for building amenities like an on-site gym and a doorman. This all had to fit within his budget of about $4,000 per month.

It was recommended that he forgo the assistance of a broker since his hunt was searchable on his own. Zoglin checked out the towers at Extell’s Riverside South, located along Riverside Boulevard but found that it was too far from public transportation for his liking. His next stop was Aire, the tower on West 67th Street that opened in 2010, where he found the space unsuitable for his needs and the rent, upwards of $5,000 too expensive. Zoglin came close to settling on a prewar building unit on Central Park West, but remembering how much the window air-conditioning at his co-op, and the draft it caused annoyed him, he passed.

Zoglin checked out several units at One Lincoln Plaza and was impressed overall by the building’s amenities, price point, size, and location. Ultimately, he landed a one-bedroom apartment that would run him $4,025 per month with free one month’s rent and even managed to negotiate getting the gym fee waived. All in all, he got what he wanted.

• Upper West Side: Prewar to Postwar [The New York Times]

from
http://ny.curbed.com/2016/6/4/11848406/from-owning-to-renting-on-the-uws-what-he-wanted-was-we-he-got