Let Us Mourn Yet Another Great Home I Will Never Own

I found a great apartment! Now I will bid it farewell

There it was on my Streeteasy app: a unicorn. An apartment that was beautiful, spacious, renovated, well-located, and well-priced. An apartment that met all of our criteria.

An apartment we won’t be able to buy.

Some months ago, as you may recall, we tried to buy a small house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Real Estate Edition

We made a generous, immediate offer of more than the asking price. We lost out to people who had almost a million dollars in cash, because that’s what happens in New York these days: buyers arrive with duffel bags stuffed full of unmarked bills as though they’re redeeming a kidnapped hostage, or bribing a starlet to go topless onscreen, rather than making a real estate investment. In fact, the Times recently reported that, the more expensive an apartment in Manhattan right now, the more likely it is to be bought with ready money.

Nationwide, cash sales accounted for a little more than a third of all home sales at the start of this year, according to the research firm CoreLogic. But in Manhattan, that figure is higher, and rises with price: In the first half of 2016, more than 44 percent of all sales were cash only, and nearly 81 percent were for homes above $5 million, according to numbers compiled for Douglas Elliman Real Estate by the appraiser Jonathan J. Miller.

A broker interviewed for the piece is frank about his preferences in this regard. “He advises the sellers he represents not to accept offers contingent on the buyer obtaining a mortgage. ‘In the last six years, there has been only one deal where we accepted a finance contingency. It’s not up to us where the cash comes from, but it must be cash.’”

That is, well, depressing for those of us whose primary assets are not, right now, in liquid form. Our current apartment will probably sell quickly and perhaps for as much as $850,000. That’s great, especially since we bought it only a few years ago for a lot less. But if we can’t buy until we sell, we will have a very narrow window in which to find a perfect place, and we’ll be trying to climb through that narrow window while dragging with us two small children and a ticking clock.

Alternatively, we move once, into a rental, and then move again shortly thereafter into a purchased place.

Both options sound so stressful that they make me want to run away and hide in someone else’s walk-in closet.

One of the things I like best about this apartment is that it’s super cheap. Why is it so cheap? Ben went to check it out and came back shrugging. It’s in a relatively low-price, middle-class area, for starters, and technically the apartment is in a basement, so there’s no pretty, carpeted hallway leading up to it; instead, visitors will be treated to the sights and smells of the laundry room while they wait for us to answer the front door. But who cares? The apartment has lots of windows and, because of a quirk of how the building is constructed, it seems to get a good amount of light anyway. More importantly, the neighborhood is walkable, green, friendly, and full of families who send their kids to well-cared-for local schools. It offers a decent commute and a more-than-decent lifestyle. And although it’s true that, once we moved, we’d never see our Brooklyn friends again, that’s probably going to be the case regardless.

Someone is going to buy this apartment, even though I’ve already, unhelpfully, begun to think of it as “mine.” Maybe you! Maybe you have over $250,000 in cash and don’t have to worry about the kind of contingent financing that makes brokers quoted in the Times so contemptuous, and you can thus enjoy those ceiling fans, those built-in bookcases, those counters, and oh, did I mention the garden? There’s an adorable courtyard garden.

What can I say? I wish you joy of it.

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