4 years ago

Save 2% When Buying in NYC: https://www.hauseit.com/hauseit-buyer-closing-credit-nyc/
NYC Buyer Closing Cost Calculator: https://www.hauseit.com/closing-cost-calculator-for-buyer-nyc/

Will you regret buying an apartment in New York City? This is something not a lot of people think about but we have a lot of thoughts on this topic. My name is Nick, I am with Hauseit. We are the largest reduced commission platform for buyers and sellers here in New York City, established in 2014. So, let's get started.

So, will you regret buying an apartment in New York City? There are a lot of ways to approach this question. I think on a personal level the most important thing to think about when you're buying is where you're going to be in two or three years time. Buying and selling an apartment in New York City using traditional brokers is very expensive.

Buyer closing cost for a condo can be 4% or more, for new construction they can be 6% and seller closing cost can exceed 10% if you're paying a 6% broker fee. So, will you regret buying an apartment? Yes, if you have to sell it after only a year or two. Unless you're in the strongest of markets, your appreciation will not be able to keep pace with the actual cost of buying and selling. So, as a general tip try to make sure you're staying at your apartment for at least 3 to 5 years.

Another regret buyers may face when buying an apartment is just having to deal with all of the headache of having neighbors particularly in small buildings. In a small building whether it’s a condo or a co-op, you are bound to become intimately familiar with your neighbors and in particular when it comes to running the building, making decisions, board meetings, controversies, everything can get quite personal very quickly and very intimate. So, you'll want to make sure that you understand this and the fact that rental building is very different from being in a building where the people you are living around might be there for ten years or more and they're really not going anywhere in good times and bad.

Buying into a large building on the other hand, can feel a bit more like living in a rental building. So, you’ll have a very large management company and you’ll have so many people who live in the building that you can feel somewhat anonymous. So, to the extent that’s something you’re looking for, buying into mid or large size building is great but if you are looking for a community and that's part of your objective as a buyer you might have some degree of regret if you move in to a really big building.

One other regret, possible regret of buying an apartment in the city is if you don’t necessarily know where your job will take you geographically. As I’m sure you’re aware most co-op building in New York City have some number of restrictions on subletting and in some cases a building might only allow subletting for a few years in a lifetime of the ownership. Now this is less common in Manhattan but is certainly as prevalent in Brooklyn and in Queens.

So if you have the kind of job that you might get reassigned to London for an indefinite period of time you might not necessarily want to just buy a co-op in particular because if you end up staying in London, say for more than two or three years, the co-op might actually force you to keep the apartment empty without a tenant which would cost you a lot of money or of course you'd have to sell the apartment. And that could certainly induce a feeling of regret to some degree.

Another possible regret of buying an apartment is the reality that it simply costs a lot of money to keep things well maintained. If you lived in a rental building in New York City since you moved here or for a number of years, you'll know that as a renter you basically don’t have to ever open your checkbook and pay for anything. So, as renter yes might've paid for a light bulb, you might have gone to home depot had a bit of fun, bought a can of paint and out of fun just painted your living room but when something serious need to be replaced and you’re an owner it can cost big money.

For example, if you have a bathroom and one of your tiles is cracked, well the cost of removing a tile, removing all of the thin set below it, chiseling it out, buying all the supplies, finding the same tile, installing it without cracking any of the other tiles around it. Well you’re looking at a thousand dollars over the course of a few days. So, if you have a couple of things that go wrong over the course of a year, owning a property can cost you thousands of dollars of upkeep.

Save 2% When Buying in NYC: https://www.hauseit.com/hauseit-buyer-closing-credit-nyc/
NYC Buyer Closing Cost Calculator: https://www.hauseit.com/closing-cost-calculator-for-buyer-nyc/
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Hauseit LLC, Licensed Real Estate Broker
Tel: (888) 494-8258 | https://www.hauseit.com
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