Right now the New York City-based Athena Group maintains both a sales and leasing office at the site, Craig London, VP with Coldwell Banker Commercial Ideal Realty Group tells GlobeSt.com. Coldwell was tapped two weeks ago to market the bloc of units. The average sell out price has been $392,000 per unit.
"There are a couple of different strategies for somebody who would come in and purchase this bloc of condos," he says. "A warehouse strategy is one option, where the owner could try to get minimally acceptable return for the next few years until market comes back. Another is to buy back units that have been sold; yet another is some combo of buying back and relocating units that have been sold so you can reconstitute the property and separate it into a contiguous apartment block and contiguous for sale condo block."
These approaches are the next step in a procession of strategies that have been tried out--some successfully, some not, depending on the individual project--since the condo market went bust here last year. These include pure play reversions and fractured reversions.
The good news for the market, London says, is that the gap between buyer and seller expectations is narrowing. He points to a similar bulk sale in a Rockville, MD 317-unit property, the Royalton. Last year the sellers were generally looking for $265,000 per unit. This year, he says, they are more amenable to a 10% cut from that.
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