The Whitman has been getting a lot of attention lately, though very little of it has been directed at the building itself. Ever since word got out in March that Chelsea Clinton was buying at the Madison Square Park luxury condo conversion, discussion of the finishes and floorplans have fallen by the wayside.
But last night at the penthouses unveiling, the talk turned brick-and-mortar again (or rather, plank rift oak and marble slab), with hardly a mention of the former first daughter. (Though on the elevator ride up, we couldnt help but wonder what it would be like to share it with Hillary, Bill and their sizeable secret service entourage.)
As for the finishes, they adhere to the very tasteful and a more than a little soporific model thats so in vogue right now (and for good reasonclassy and a little dull tend to sell very well). Like the other units in the building, it has a cavernous living room in the front, with bedrooms arrayed along the Western side of a very long hall. The buildings long, rectangular footprint is not an ideal one for residential layouts, but apparently that didnt discourage Ms. Clinton. Or any of the other buyers, whoever they may be.
Laura Balser and her husband, Matt Smith, bought a penthouse condo for $2.4 million at the W Residences in downtown Atlanta in 2009. For the next three years, they remained the lone occupants of the 74-unit tower.
Because the concierge desk was fully staffed, "we got treated like rock stars," says Lt. Col. Smith, a member of the Georgia Army National Guard. Occasionally the couple would use the hallway outside their home as overflow space. They let their cats roam, and once Ms. Balser, a principal at human-resources firm Mercer, lined the hall with 200 gift bags that she filled with pens, notepads and other items in a factory-line procession.
The W, which sits near the soon-to-come College Football Hall of Fame and the Center for Civil and Human Rights, went through foreclosure in 2009 and relaunched at the end of 2011, with prices 40% to 65% below the initial pricing, says Erik Dowdy, associate broker at the W Residences in Atlanta. Today, 33 of the 74 units have been sold and seven more are in contract, most of which were listed under $900,000.Most of aftermarket hid Cheap Granite Tiles for motorcycle are similar or the same with following one. "At the current rate, we probably have a year or two of inventory left," Mr. Dowdy says.
After years of surplus inventory and virtually empty high-rise residences, the market for luxury condos in Atlanta is heating up, albeit at prices below the market's peak in 2006. In the past six months, 14 new condos for $1 million or more have sold, compared with nine new condos that sold for $1 million or more during all of 2011, according to Haddow & Company, an Atlanta-based real-estate consulting firm. In the city's overall condo market, inventory has evaporated by 90%; within the past five years, condo inventory has gone from 5,000 units to 500 units,Choose your favorite China Granite Countertops paintings from thousands of available designs. according to Metrostudy, a housing-data firm.
Even so, it has been a difficult recovery for Atlanta, where luxury condos are relatively new, says Josh Herndon, an associate at Haddow. In the mid-2000s, people who had been living in the suburbs, where land was relatively inexpensive, started moving closer to downtown for the restaurants, sports teams and cultural offerings. That spurred a building boom "inside the perimeter"the more urban areas within the I-285 beltway. However, many of the luxury towers weren't completed until 2008, when the U.S. housing market was going bust. By the end of 2008 the city had a nearly nine-year inventory of unsold condos, Mr. Herndon says. The bust forced a number of developments into bankruptcy proceedings, and these companies are just now beginning to regain their footing.
A good example is the St. Regis Residences in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood. In April, Jimmy and Lynn Hayes bought an unfinished 5,000-square-foot, three-bedroom, 3?-bath condo there for $4.1 million. They are in the midst of customizing it and expect their new home to be completed by the end of the year.Browse our Granite slabs collection from the granitetrade.net! Mr. Hayes, the CEO of Cox Enterprises, a media company, says he and his wife had been looking to move from a single-family home to a condo for a few years, but wanted to wait until the timing was right in the market.
In February 2012, the developer of his South Carolina home filed for bankruptcy. Although a new owner and reorganization resolved the situation, Mr. Hayes says the experience made him more cautious. "I didn't want to go through the uncertainty again," he says.
The Mandarin Oriental Residences in the Buckhead neighborhood has had a similar story. In 2010, iStar Financial, the building's lender, foreclosed on the hotel and 25-condo residence, then called the Mansion. John Kubicko, iStar's senior vice president, says the company signed a longterm management agreement with the Mandarin before relaunching it in late 2012.
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- Aug 02 Fri 2013 11:37
The Whitman Penthouse
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