Posted: Thursday, 24 April 2008 5:23PM
Manhattan Basement Sells for $801K
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NEW YORK (AP) -- Looking for another sign that Manhattan real estate prices aren't headed for the cellar? A basement storage room in the famed Dakota apartment building fetched $801,000 in a recent sale.
High prices are nothing new for the Dakota, a gorgeous, gabled palace overlooking Central Park, best known as the home of John Lennon and the scene of his 1980 assassination. Yoko Ono still lives there and its apartments routinely sell for  many millions of dollars.
The room's buyer, hedge fund manager John Angelo, said the price was reasonable, considering what he's getting.
The space is 800 square feet and has 20-foot-high ceilings and two windows, he said, making it bigger than many apartments in Manhattan, where a studio can be as small as 300 square feet and the median price for an apartment is over $850,000.
His storage space also has a bathroom and electricity. ``I could make it a squash court if I wanted,'' Angelo said, only half joking.
He said he plans to turn the room into a small gymnasium and open it up for use by other residents of the building, which, for all its luxury, doesn't have a common exercise room.
Angelo and his wife already live in the Dakota. They acquired the basement space from a departing resident, Juliana Curran Terian, who sold her apartment for $20.5 million in January. That unit was once owned by the composer Leonard Bernstein. She sold the storage room separately.
While $801,000 may sound like a lot for a basement den that cannot legally be used as a dwelling, it isn't unusual to see well-off Manhattanites paying top dollar for auxiliary space, said real estate appraiser Jonathan Miller.
A 100-square-foot to 200-square-foot storage room in an upper crust building could easily sell for $150,000 to $350,000, if it had a sink or its own toilet, he said.
After all, he explained, just about everyone in New York is dying for extra space, even if that room is down the hall or on another floor.
``You'll see people who use it as their writing studio, or as a separate office for an assistant,'' he said. ``I'm seeing them used less and less for just bulk storage.''
A room at the Dakota, he added, is likely to bring a premium.
Residents of the landmark building have included Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, Boris Karloff, Jason Robards, Roberta Flack, Connie Chung and John Madden. |
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