Luxury Condo in SoHo Scheduled for Auction

Manhattan is no stranger to big-ticket foreclosure auctions, with properties once valued above the $60 million mark ending up on the foreclosure block. But aside from the inevitable media spectacle they give rise to, very few of these properties are of interest to home buyers and investors as their lien amount generally exceeds their valuation.

Not this time around. An apartment in the luxury residential building at The Lofts of Green Street in SoHo, Manhattan (aka 105 Greene Street) is scheduled for auction on October 23rd with a lien amount of $3.5 million. What makes this upcoming foreclosure auction bloggable is not the $3.5 M lien amount, which is small compared to other large foreclosure cases, but that this seems to be one of those rare cases where investors might get a great deal bidding at the auction.

All apartments in the building that sold after 2005 have traded for more than $4 million. An identically-sized apartment of 3,006 square feet on the third floor was sold for $4M in 2009, while this year a 2,400 square foot penthouse traded for close to $5 million.

Similarly-sized apartments listed for sale in Soho range from $4.95 M for a 2-bedroom co-op on 17 Greene Street to $13,995,000 for an 3-bedroom apartment on 40 Mercer Street. While we don’t know what condition the apartment is in, it does sound like there’s a lot of potential in it. What’s your take on this?

Disclaimer: the information provided in this post is not, and should not be regarded as investment advice. Buying properties at auction has certain risks attached to it (e.g. poor state of the property, existence of secondary liens), and no due diligence was made to eliminate any of them.