apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

The point of fixer-uppers is that you do not have to drool.

that first picture does make me drool--imagine the ghosts waltzing around in there!

So lovely. Alas, my checkbook is weeping...

The crazy thing is that the purchase price plus reno costs generally aren't that much lower than the estimated resale values. Except that you have given up a year to years of your life to renovation. Design and decoration may be fun, but gut renovation is largely about stress.

And I bet they don't include the carrying cost of the mortgage while the property is uninhabitable during renovation.

I see that these properties have potentail. But this is appalling. This is what is wrong with NYC real estate. There is no way they should be selling these properties at such an inflated price. Who is going to buy that house in Ditmas Park-even if it was renovated? 1.5 million in Ditmans Park. It just doesnt make sense.Crazy crazy crazy. Who is the person estimating the values of these places? Someone has been smoking.

Rule about buying a piece of property: Don't fall in love with it's potential. Unless you have a bottomless bank account, of course.

Love those pictures!

I have to disagree with ehy2k's comment. My husband and I have done very well with buying properties that were neglected and quite ugly, but with great potential for being beautiful with some work.

Fortunately we work very well together and rather enjoy the DIY thing. We also have a great tolerance for delayed gratification, so we do projects as we're able to afford them.
I will also add that our bank account is far from bottomless! In fact, we focused on fixer-uppers because we don't have particularly deep pockets. Doing our own cleaning/painting/flooring/refinishing/repairing/etc etc etc has saved us a lot of money in labor costs. And there's great gratification in being able to say, "I did that".

This isn't in NYC, however, and the prices and physical scale of weren't even close to the order of magnitude of the projects in that slideshow!

Trumystique, you make me smile. I agree, the real estate market is stupid in New York, and yes the real estate agents that give the estimates MUST have some good quality weed. Maybe we should start all smoking to understand them better :-)

New York real estate is insane. Why can't we just export Wall Street to China or India like we have with all of our other virtual industries? Think about it... they're the ones forcing the rest of us to accept substandard living conditions for top dollar...

I'm just sayin'...

The point of a "fixer-upper" is that it's cheap... you should pay for "what you get", not "what it could be if poured a bunch more money in". If you're doing the latter, you're paying for it twice.