By Patricia Beckwith
We are now in a buyer’s market in New York. There are plenty of apartments on the market, and many sellers are eager to make a deal. Uncertain times, however, might lead you to be conservative, buying the smallest apartment possible to minimize risk. This strategy is shortsighted and will not serve you well long term.
In a down market environment such as we have now, the right move is to buy the largest apartment that you can afford. If studios, one bedrooms, and two bedrooms are all down a certain percentage, the larger apartments have gone down more in actual dollars. As a buyer, you should view this as an opportunity to get into a home that will suit you in the long term, no matter what the future holds. Experts believe we are now in a nine-year long real estate stretch, meaning that whatever you buy now, you will have to hold onto for nearly a decade. Think of all the events that could transform your situation in that time—marriage, children, new job. Even five years from now, that studio will look less like a bargain and more like an albatross.
Newspapers frequently chronicle the dilemmas faced by young couples who live quite happily in a studio apartment until a baby (or two) arrives. Even if they have fitted out the apartment like a ship’s cabin with storage for everything (including a dining table that flips down to eat and retracts into the wall when dinner is over), this setup is just not enough room for a growing family, no matter how much they enjoy being together! Unfortunately, if they enter this phase of life at a time when real estate prices are at very high levels, they may not be able to step up to the size apartment that would be comfortable for them later on.
Many studios will have the same square footage as one bedroom apartments, but having that extra room will give you greater flexibility, not only if you stay but also if you need to move. When the market comes out of this cycle, which it surely will, a larger apartment will have more marketability. Are there exceptions? Yes. A studio might be a good choice for someone who wants a pied a terre for occasional visits to the city, and is sure that she will never want or need more space.
Patricia Beckwith is a founding member of Stribling & Associates. She can be reached at pbeckwith@stribling.com.
We all judge space differently. I remember being shocked when I visited my friends on Riverside Drive in the Upper 90s who had just had their second child and were moving out of New York to Long Island, in search of more space. The husband in the couple had always refered to it as a studio converted to a one bedroom. I expected to see a cramped place with two cribs in the bedroom. Instead I saw an immense loft apartment that could have been divided into a four bedroom apartment. The one bedroom alone was about twice the size of a typical studio apartment. There was a huge living room, a dining room, and a kitchen space that was the size of 4 typical New York City kitchens. Certainly a house with yard and garden near the ocean might have afforded them more space but they could have done a lot with that apartment, particularly since they dreaded leaving Manhattan and are not very happy in the new location.