The year 2012 will go down in real estate history as the year of the 100-year storm — and the $100 million apartment.
From a housing perspective, the biggest story by far was Hurricane Sandy. Millions of New Yorkers were left without power. Neighborhoods like Breezy Point and Red Hook experienced crippling damage. Thousands of residents still have not returned to their apartments in the Financial District, and dozens of buildings in that neighborhood were flooded.
“From a personal standpoint, I was homeless,” says Shermon Peters, the owner of Rosetta Wines, at 40 Exchange Place in FiDi, who was living at 2 Gold St.
Lorenzo Ciniglio(2)
Hurricane Sandy hasn’t stopped downtown development, which will include conversions like the Woolworth.
Peters stayed with his parents in Queens, and then camped out in his van parked outside Rosetta Wines (mercifully spared from the storm). “Several businesses were looted, so I decided to stay in front of my store each night, just to keep an eye on it.”
Move-back dates for the 2 Gold rental building are not scheduled until March, so Peters asked one of his customers, Cyrus Eyn, of Platinum Properties, if he knew of any nearby apartments. Eyn found him a one-bedroom at William Beaver House. For about two weeks, Peters would climb 20 stories to get bags of clothing out of his old apartment while wearing a gas mask. (A boiler had exploded during the storm, and the hallways reeked of fuel.)
And 2 Gold (which also suffered a rash of robberies in the ensuing chaos) was only one of the luxury apartment buildings — which included 88 Greenwich St., 201 Pearl St., 95 Wall St. and others — damaged by Sandy. According to the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, rental transactions are down a jaw-dropping 70 percent from last year in lower Manhattan.
But the fact that Peters is still living in FiDi says something about the area’s staying power.
“In the last couple of weeks, we have rented to a number of people from 2 Gold and 88 Greenwich,” says Kristen Risko of LCOR, whose building, 25 Broad, is offering displaced residents six-month leases, or three free months on an 18-month lease. “We’ve probably gotten 12 residents — and I have two pending applications.”
“People are still renting and still looking down there,” says Platinum Properties President Daniel Hedaya, who sells and leases apartments all over FiDi.
And developers aren’t shying away from the area, either.
Ken Horn, the head of Alchemy Properties, is moving full speed ahead with plans to turn the top 30 floors of the 58-story Woolworth Building into 36 to 42 condos. (Exact numbers haven’t been set.) “Our goal is to hit the market in the fourth quarter of 2013,” Horn says. The building will feature a 6,000- to 7,000-square-foot cupola penthouse, which will almost certainly be one of the city’s top trophy properties.
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