Brooklyn bump

It's something of a swan story. Back in the bad old days, four years ago when the economy was tanking, a lot of new developments suffered. But some buildings had it worse than others, with preconstruction units languishing on the market, banks moving toward foreclosure, construction loans drying up and buyers deeming entire buildings damaged goods. In desperation, a handful of Brooklyn developers with ugly-duckling developments chose to sell their units at fire-sale prices, lopping off 20 percent or more.

Now, like the fairy-tale duckling, these condo buildings are suddenly realizing their worth.

N.Y.Post: Brian Zak

In 2009, the developer of Fort Greene's Forte condo building started selling apartments for about $500 per square foot. Prices have climbed nearly 50 percent since Forte'sdiscounted deals.

Take Williamsburg's Warehouse 11. According to David Maundrell, president of aptsandlofts.com, which marketed the building, the project was 75 percent complete in 2009 when the bank threatened foreclosure. Panicked, the developer negotiated a deal that allowed him to take proceeds from early sales and pay back a discounted amount on his loan. The catch was that he had a very limited time in which to do it.

"I set off the fire sales there," says Maundrell. "We sold 30 apartments of the 120 in the first night, at $500 a foot."

Now, a mere four years later, these same units are being resold for $900-plus per square foot — nearly twice the price of their initial sales.

This is no isolated incident. Downtown Brooklyn's Be@Schermerhorn and Fort Greene's Forte were both faced with similarly dire situations that also led them to slash prices. Both have recovered their value — and then some.

"Once we reduced the prices, we sold the building in less than a year," Rhoda Dunn, senior associate at the Corcoran Group, says of Be@Schermerhorn, where she was part of the original sales team. "The bottom line was the price."

Dunn just helped resell unit 12B. The 662-square-foot one-bedroom closed in February 2011 for $400,000. Just over two years later, in March, the same unit sold for $620,000 — a price increase of more than 50 percent.

So what's changed? Basically, everything.

"[At the time there] was also the Forte and Toren and Oro, all this inventory, and now it's all gone and there are these people who want to buy," Dunn says. "People are feeling good about the economy, and the interest rates are still low. There's demand and little inventory. It's really a function of supply and demand."

It helps that the buying public has no long-term memory.

Forte, built in 2006, sat so long on the market that it found itself with a bad reputation.

"Part of the problem was they were comparing themselves to One Hanson in regard to pricing, but One Hanson had better finishes and more amenities. This was the primary reason that the units sat on the market and eventually got stale," says Rodolfo Lucchese, a senior vice president at the Corcoran Group, which took over sales of Forte in 2009. "[The listings] were dead in the water; it had lost its buzz, so you're looking at sales that were really slashed."

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