Dennis Rodkin has the dirt on the “first modern-day foreclosure” to hit East Lake Shore Drive: a 3,800 square-foot condo in the street’s only condo building, The Mayfair. The second-floor three-bedroom had been listed as a regular sale for as much as $2.99 million in 2009, and returned to the market in September as a foreclosure, priced at $2.19 million. It sold this month for $1.9 million.
Last year, Joe Zekas toured unit 7E at The Mayfair with Realtors Joanne Nemerovski and Fran Fryman. (You can watch their tour below.) The home, which is in the same tier as the foreclosed home, recently sold for $2.62 million. Says Rodkin: “That seventh-floor condo, which was sold conventionally, does not have a terrace like this one (the foreclosed unit), which suggests that this condo would be worth considerably more than $2.62 million on the conventional market.”
Thats a whole lot of instant equity for whoever bought it. SMART
Simon,
There may or may not be instant equity.
I’m not quite sure what Rodkin means when he says the 7th floor unit “doesn’t have a terrace like this one.”
I haven’t seen the foreclosed unit or its terrace, but the 7th floor unit I visited and shot video of does have a terrace that I’d guess is about 600 square feet, the size Rodkin quotes for this unit.
The 7th floor unit’s terrace has a bit of a view, which you can see in my video, above, beginning at about 6:45.
It’s technically accurate, but somewhat laughable to state that the terrace of the 2nd floor unit “faces Walton.” There’s no view of Walton even from the 7th floor, much less from the 2nd. The 7th floor unit would clearly also have much better light than the 2nd.
The 7th floor unit also has a better view north along LSD than the 2nd floor would have, and that view is highly-prized.
Without having seen the 2nd floor I can’t compare the finish levels, but it’s hard to imagine that it can have been done much better than the 7th floor unit or be in any better condition.
All in all, I’d say the jury is very much out on whether the buyer of this unit got a better deal than the buyer of the 7th floor one. Certainly any small discrepancy in the size of the terraces, if such a discrepancy even exists, wouldn’t add that much value to the second floor unit.
It’s also worth noting that Joe Askins apparently followed Rodkin’s erroneous lead in stating that 189 is the only condo on East LSD. 219 East LSD is also a condo.