Renovations in the West Village Suggest Increased High-End Movement

Posted on Wed, 01-11-2012

It’s difficult to believe the West Village is ground zero for new high-end real estate. Anyone who walks through that part of Manhattan will see that not only is most of the space all taken up, but its taken up by small, independent boutiques, dive bars, and prewar multi-family townhouses and brownstones. Not exactly the stuff that surrounds luxury Manhattan condos. But there’s been an influx of high-end development in the area recently, and several ultra-luxury Manhattan condos for sale are scheduled to open over the next few years. How are developers dealing with the space constraints? They’re focused entirely on redevelopment. Which means that many of the West Village’s old and derelict commercial buildings are becoming new, modern luxury condos.

Several reconstruction projects have been announced over the past year in this part of downtown Manhattan. The largest is at Seventh Avenue and 11th Street, a 590,000 square foot site where the closed St. Vincent’s Hospital currently sits. The space was bought by the Rudin Management Company in October for $260 million. Rudin plans to level some of the existing buildings on the site, and rebuild the other, to create 450 new condos, and 5 townhouses. It will also devote 15,000 square feet to a new park, and build am elementary school, and a 24-hour medical emergency facility. The medical facility is scheduled to open in 2013, while the condos will begin selling in 2014, hopefully opening the next year.

Some of the other that are scheduled to open this year we wrote about previously. 150 Charles Street, the storage shed-turned luxury condo building with waterfall design, is one such building, as is The Abingdon, a former nursing home on 607 Hudson Street. Several other projects, including the construction of 4 townhouses at 145 Perry Street, and a former rental building at 421 Hudson Street that is being converted into a condo building.

Real estate insiders think that the influx of high-end condos in the West Village has to do with the success of two multimillion dollar purchases that took place in a condo building on 400 West 12th Street in 2011. There a penthouse and a 4 bedroom suite sold for $31.5 million and $17.5 million respectively. Insiders think when developers saw that homes that expensive could sell in the West Village, they were encouraged to build their own.

For now it means that the West Village is getting a jolt of new real estate in a market that is hungry for it. As we said in our earlier post, this suggests that the neighborhood could gain additional notoriety over the next several years. For those that can afford it, the West Village may become a particularly desirable place for New Yorkers to settle down.

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