|
River views
Yonkers housing on line
By JOHN GOLDEN, Westchester County Business Journal
February 18, 2008
Stormy weather forced owners of 66 Main, the latest addition to a
growing residential community on the downtown Yonkers waterfront, to
postpone their valentine-themed open house last week.
Still, about 40 persons showed up that evening to tour the 170-unit
luxury apartment building that opened for occupancy this month.
Apparently, word of the postponement hadn’t spread quickly among the
Craigslist and YouTube set.
That is the youthful, technologically hip crowd that MetroPartners
L.L.C., developers of the approximately $50 million Main Street project
near the Metro-North Railroad Station, look to attract to Yonkers, said
partner Kenneth W. Dearden. Those young professionals are the targets of
the company’s current “I Gotta Move!” contest, in which contestants can
submit their entries in essay form or as videos posted on the company’s
YouTube site. The winner will receive $3,366 in rent.
“It’s a contest to attract renters but we anticipated, and it did, get
us a lot of media attention.” Dearden said.
The first 10 residents moved into 66 Main this month, to be followed by
another 15 in March. With 110 units still available, “We expect it to be
about a six-month lease-out period,” he said.
As at Metro 92, the partners’ nearby 40-loft residence in a converted
Main Street trolley garage, “Our demographic is young professional,
tech-savvy,” Dearden said of their marketing thrust. “It’s a market-rate
rent so you have to have a pretty good-paying job.” Renters drawn there
typically are young childless couples or roommates, at least one of whom
commutes to Manhattan, he said.
Rents at 66 Main range from $1,400 to $1,800 for a studio apartment,
$1,900 to $2,200 for a one-bedroom unit and $2,400 to $3,600 for a
two-bedroom unit. Those rates are about half of what Manhattan renters
pay for similar luxury apartments and about two-thirds comparable
Brooklyn rents. They amount to about a 20 percent discount on similar
luxury apartments in White Plains, Dearden said.
“Yonkers is an emerging market,” he said. “We know we need to attract
them from White Plains.”
That emerging residential market should blossom this spring with the
expected April 1 opening of nearby Hudson Park North, a 294-unit luxury
apartment complex in two towers on the waterfront. Rents there start at
$1,800 for a one-bedroom unit and $2,300 for two bedrooms.
More than 100 applicants are on the waiting list there, said Arthur
Collins, co-founding principal of Collins Enterprises L.L.C., the
Stamford, Conn. company developing Hudson Park North in a joint venture
with AIG Global Real Estate. The 266 luxury apartments at Hudson Park
South, the first phase of Collins’ approximately $200 million multi-use
development, are nearly fully leased.
Collins said 60 percent to 70 percent of Hudson Park South residents
work in Manhattan, primarily in middle management, and use the adjacent
Metro-North train station to commute there. Residents are about an
equally proportioned mix of empty nesters, young professionals or
couples looking for permanent housing and transient professionals
employed in the metropolitan area for two or three years, he said.
“Most of these people are moving (to Yonkers) to be close to their place
of employment,” Collins said. “There really hasn’t been much between
Tarrytown and Riverdale” for renters.
Both Collins and Dearden said the economic downturn has not hurt the
volume of rentals at their Yonkers developments. “In fact, it’s helping
it,” Collins said, as persons delay purchases of condos or houses and
look for relief from rents in New York City, “the worst rental market in
the country,” he said.
“We’ve been providing a cheaper product with better amenities and larger
units than you can get in Manhattan,” Collins said. “That’s been our
angle on the marketplace.”
Dearden said Yonkers developers are helped by the scarcity of apartment
construction in this market in the last decade. “There’s a pent-up
demand for rentals,” he said. “You have a lot of aging apartment stock
in Manhattan. Despite the number of cranes going up in Manhattan, I
think it’s barely keeping pace with the older buildings going offline.”
On the downtown Yonkers waterfront, “We’re highly enthusiastic that the
train’s pulling out of the station,” Dearden said. “It’s a great view, a
great commute.
“By the summer, you should have 770-some units of first-class housing
downtown” with the additions of 66 Main and Hudson Park North, he said.
“The way we look at it is, there’s not enough supply that we’re
competitive” with Collins and other developers. “Until you get up to
several thousand units, we’re not competitive with each other. We’re
synergistic. The more the merrier.
“The more we get, the more we start to build a community there – people
with disposable income who have money to spend in the area as well as
for their apartment. That bodes well for everybody” in business there.
“Build it and they will come,” Dearden said. “We want to keep building
it so they’ll keep coming.”
|
