Out and About: Windows best for jumping out

View, what view?

Short is the distance between a high window in a prison cell and rooms with windows jammed into a corner.

Although the exemplar in the above photo, taken in a co-op between Amsterdam and Columbus avenues in the low 90s, shows that light enters the living room, the windows add nothing else.  In fact, they throw off the room’s balance.

Without going up to the windows themselves,  such a configuration require a resident to hike over to them just to know the weather.  They probably are better for jumping out than looking through.

Yet the apartment,

Out and About: Walls always speak volumes

Portion of a wall that needs help

Clean windows, polished floors, organized closets and sleek kitchen all communicate positive aspects of any home being considered by buyers.

One characteristic that is not usually noticed at once also can have a decided impact on first impressions and subsequent appreciation of properties on the market.

That is the walls, especially in pre-war apartments and townhouses. The shape they are in speaks volumes.  They thereby affect prices in ways that can elevate or depress the selling price.

Consider the photo above. Perhaps you can

Out and About: Desperate measures warranted?

Truncated living room in an Upper West Side studio apartment.

Given the cost of residential real estate in Manhattan, nothing could be more understandable than buyers’ willingness to match the imperfect co-op or condo that they decide to purchase with the amount of money they can afford.

Consequently, many folks in search of a new home readily accept the necessity of turning a two-bedroom apartment into a three-bedroom unit, an alcove studio into a one-bedroom home.

But they invariably pay a price both in aesthetics and, paradoxically, flexibility.  Gone the dining area, the well-placed window in the living room, the airy ambiance.

So it is with

Out and About: It’s hard to fill in the blanks

Views through floor-to-ceiling windows are winning, but even well staged vacant apartments like this one can have a chilling effect on buyers.

There’s always something a little mournful about unoccupied apartments, except those in new developments.

Empty but, occasionally, with sparse staging, they seem to me to cry out for attention.  They remind me of cats and dogs in cages eager for the release that comes with adoption.

“Take me, I’m yours,” both the creatures and the condos or co-ops plead.

Their challenge — the apartments, not the dogs or cats — is that

Out and About: ‘Affordable’ co-op needs fix-up

Kitchen of 775-sf apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Some Manhattan apartments in popular neighborhoods actually are affordable for buyers whose incomes put them in the middle class.

However, many of those units have less realized than actually fulfilled potential such as one in the low 90s close to Central Park.

The co-op is in one of the formerly city-owned buildings transferred to a Housing Development Fund Corp. and thus is known as an HDFC apartment.

HDFC apartments come with income restrictions, but they are reasonably liberal.  The latest median income standards

Out and About: Against the odds, different owners approve purchase of 3 adjoining units

In a building that I have often visited, this listing is not one that I happened to see.

But it caught my interest when a friend who lives in the somewhat dowdy Upper West Side building on Riverside Drive in the very low 90s expressed wonder at the asking price close to $9 million.

Although large apartments are much in demand, it is a lot of money, especially in light of the more than $1 million in renovations that likely must be undertaken to combine and, where necessary, upgrade the three co-ops (floorplan above) on the market as a single penthouse.

According to my friend, the couple in one of the units

Out and About: Seller lives in Fantasyland.

Lincoln Center (Flickr photo by Stewart Morris)

He closed on the place only last May, when it was listed for $2.15 million.

There was a bidding war for the two-bedroom, two-terrace, two-bath penthouse in a Central Park block of the mid 60s, an area that is part of Lincoln Square.

Because of the so-called “war,” the current owner — who appears to be an advertising agency executive — paid $2.5 million for the co-op, which costs him $3,269 in maintenance a month.

But for undisclosed reasons relating to the seller’s inability to continue living in New York, according to the listing broker, the apartment went on the market again in early December with an asking price that boggles the mind.

Out and About: Truthfully, there is a free lunch

(Flickr photo by Glamhag)

If you are anything like me, you like getting something for nothing.

And if other brokers are anything like me, they are suckers for giveaways as well.

Offering free stuff is one way of luring brokers to open houses geared to the industry.  I confess to feeling a bit ashamed to say that it works for me.

I’ve provided it myself, the logic being not only that more brokers will attend an open house but that they’ll spend more timing absorbing its characteristics while they chomp on a lunch that is close to free — that is, if we value our time at nothing.

(Often, it is lenders, not brokers, who pick up the tab as a way of promoting themselves to brokers.)

Although I don’t go out of my way to attend such open houses, I’ll acknowledge that

Out and About: How does your garden grow?

One of the houses with virtues that Barbara Corcoran extolled recently on the Today Show.

The one-bedroom, two-bath duplex I was checking out during a Sunday open house recently has two assets and many liabilities.

On the minus side are its entry almost directly into the small kitchen (in which an ancient dishwasher caught my eye), cramped living room, a spiral staircase so narrow that I had to hunch my shoulders, its bedroom (albeit one that fits the legal definition) in the basement and baths that I’d classify as ordinary.

On the plus side is its location in a Central Park block of the high 60s, a stone’s throw from Lincoln Center.  (To digress, when you see “steps from” in a listing, consider the Fair Housing Act, which bars discrimination against persons with disabilities.)

Also on the plus side — and the only conceivable explanation for the co-op’s inflated asking price of

Out and About: It’s wrong to gild a (faded) lily

This photo of a brownstone

Because we are moving into August, there will be just one more Out and About before Labor Day.  But you’ll find other posts, published somewhat less frequently than usual, until then.

Have a look at the photo at the left and consider how much you approve of painting over antique woodwork.

Having seen that wonderfully ornate woodwork, I suspect that someone has monkeyed with the photo. In person, I was turned off by many layers of paint that obscured the detail and failed to cover up numerous underlying flaws.  (Unfortunately, the photo doesn’t do the bannister injustice.)

It seems clear that the paint, as usually is the case, was a cost-saving shortcut that, to my mind, only amplified the defects in the woodwork. How lovely that ornamentation would have looked when repaired and polished. But how expensive the project would be.

Such corner cutting is typical of what I see in turn-of-the-century brownstones that have been divided into apartments, and I think