The Washington Irving Condominium - 203 West 112 Street
1. BUILDING OVERVIEW (ANALYST FRAMING)
Building Type: Prewar Resale Condo (Built 1898, Converted ~2003).
Scale: 6 Floors, 13 Units.
Primary Category: Appreciation-Driven.
Secondary Category: Cyclical.
Justification: Post-sponsor data indicates an ultra-boutique, large-layout building that suffers from intense secondary market friction but successfully compounds wealth over extreme hold periods. Early sponsor sales cleared at highly discounted baselines of $395–$840/SF in 2003–2004. The rare mature resales demonstrate massive structural appreciation, reaching a $1,074/SF peak by 2018. However, the building trades so infrequently (only 4 pure resales over two decades) that it lacks the data to explicitly prove it is tracking the NYXRCSA benchmark’s recent push to historic all-time highs of 330–333 in late 2025 and early 2026. With crippling DOM friction (up to 312 days on sales and 213 days on rentals) and zero active liquidity, the building entirely fails Core/Defensive metrics and functions strictly as a long-term, highly illiquid store of value.
2. UNIT MIX & COMPOSITION
Based on transaction-weighted historical data across 18 explicitly categorized sales records:
Studio: ~5.5% of sales volume (1 past sale, an anomalous 3,200 SF unit).
4BR: ~50% of sales volume (9 past sales).
Unlabeled (Large Footprints): ~44.5% of sales volume (8 past sales, ranging from 1,118 to 1,444 SF, functioning as 2BR/3BR equivalents).
Influence on Liquidity & Rent Behavior: The building is extraordinarily top-heavy, dominated almost entirely by massive family-sized footprints (frequently 1,400 to 1,800+ SF). The absolute absence of a standard 1BR or manageable 2BR segment deprives the building of a functional, high-velocity liquidity engine. Consequently, the massive footprints dictate the building's operational rhythm, resulting in extreme structural drag on both the sales market (requiring specialized buyers) and the rental market, where units sit for months waiting to absorb.
3. LINE (STACK) PERFORMANCE — RESALE ONLY
A. Liquidity
Fastest Resale Velocity: True high-velocity liquidity is practically non-existent. A rare outlier, Penthouse 6PHE, cleared in 36 days during the 2018 peak market.
Slowest Resale Velocity: The building experiences punishing liquidity crises across its core inventory. Standard mature resales carry extreme structural drag: Unit 3W sat for 312 days before clearing, and Unit 5W required 76 days.
B. Price Strength
Because turnover is so low, line-by-line price strength is anecdotal rather than statistical. Penthouses successfully commanded deep premiums at the mid-cycle peak ($1,074/SF for 6PHE in 2018), while lower-floor massive units hold a lower plateau ($774/SF for 3E in 2019).
C. Appreciation
Lines have compounded robustly over the long term. Holders who entered during the 2003–2004 sponsor clearance phase captured massive structural equity (+50% to +89%) when exiting in later cycles.
4. BUILDING-WIDE PPSF TREND (NORMALIZED)
2003–2004 (Sponsor Clearance): Initial volume heavily clustered between $395–$610/SF, with penthouses pushing $840/SF.
2007–2010 (Early Maturation): Strong recovery achieving pricing power in the $790–$895/SF bracket on mature resales.
2018–2019 (Mid-Cycle Peak): Continued growth and stabilization, pushing upward to $774–$1,074/SF. Conclusion: Compounding. The building successfully generated massive wealth from its conversion baseline, though it lacks recent 2020s data to map against current macro peaks.
5. RENT CAPTURE ANALYSIS
A. Rent Capture by Line & Unit Type
Formula: Effective Annual Rent = Achieved Rent × (365 − Rental DOM) ÷ 365.
Example 1 (Severe Leakage): Unit 2W (4BR). Achieved $5,995/mo. DOM 89 (in 2025). Effective Rent = $5,995 × (365 - 89) ÷ 365 = $4,533/mo.
Example 2 (Catastrophic Leakage): Unit 2W (4BR). Achieved $4,250/mo. DOM 213 (in 2021). Effective Rent = $4,250 × (365 - 213) ÷ 365 = $1,769/mo.
B. Rent Appreciation Nominal rent yields moderate top-line rates (approx $49/SF based on 2W's 1,442 SF footprint). However, true rent capture is highly volatile on these massive 4BR footprints; unpredictable localized DOM spikes (89 to 213 days) create devastating cash flow leakage that heavily destroys realized annual yields for landlords.
6. B³ SCORING SYSTEM (0–100)
Liquidity Score: 20
Speed: Failing. Normalized resale DOM routinely stretches past 76 to 312 days.
Consistency: Failing. Extreme holding friction defines the secondary market, with near-zero turnover depth over two decades.
Rent Capture Score: 40
Efficiency: Moderate nominal rates.
Absorption: Failing. Baseline rates are severely compromised by catastrophic 89 to 213-day rental DOM outliers.
Appreciation Score: 85
Durability: Excellent structural compounding from original sponsor baselines. Post-sponsor values are highly resilient, locking in immense gains across the available dataset.
7. COMPOSITE SCORE & CLASSIFICATION
Composite Score = (20 × 0.35) + (40 × 0.30) + (85 × 0.35) = 48.75. Category Assignment: Appreciation-Driven. The asset's robust compounding behavior acts as its sole structural strength. Punishing holding costs in the sales market, zero transactional momentum, and highly volatile rental leakage entirely prevent it from operating as a Hybrid or Core asset.
8. TRANSACTION EXAMPLES (REQUIRED)
Resale Appreciation (Structural Compounding):
Unit 3E (4BR): Dec 2003 Sponsor Baseline ($408/SF) → Apr 2019 Resale ($774/SF). Held 15.3 years. +89.7% change (CAGR ~4.3%). Driver: Market regime timing.
Unit 6PHE (4BR): Jan 2004 Sponsor Baseline ($602/SF) → Jul 2018 Resale ($1,074/SF with 36 DOM). Held 14.5 years. +78.4% change (CAGR ~4.0%). Driver: Market regime timing.
Unit 5W (4BR): Dec 2003 Sponsor Baseline ($504/SF) → Jul 2007 Resale ($790/SF with 76 DOM). Held 3.5 years. +56.7% change (CAGR ~13.7%). Driver: Sponsor price normalization + Market regime timing.
Unit 3W (4BR): Dec 2003 Sponsor Baseline ($587/SF) → Jun 2010 Resale ($895/SF with 312 DOM). Held 6.5 years. +52.4% change (CAGR ~6.5%). Driver: Market regime timing + Liquidity shift (DOM change).
(Note: Due to the extreme lack of building turnover, no true back-to-back resale depreciation pairs exist in the dataset).
9. RISKS & RED FLAGS
Chronic Illiquidity and Zero Turnover Depth: The building's massive 4BR inventory routinely sits for highly destructive intervals on the sales market (frequently 300+ days) and the entire building rarely trades at all, representing intense secondary friction.
Rental Yield Leakage on Massive Units: Landlords holding 4BR layouts are heavily exposed to volatile vacancy; outsized rental DOMs (89 to 213 days) completely destroy up to 58% of a year's gross yield.
Avoid: Purchasing any unit under the assumption of short-term or medium-term liquidity. The steep cost of time completely neutralizes theoretical equity gains if a fast exit is required; this building demands a 10-to-15 year time horizon.
10. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Washington Irving Condominium (203 West 112 Street) is an ultra-boutique, Appreciation-Driven prewar conversion that has demonstrated highly durable long-term wealth compounding but aggressively punishes investors requiring liquidity. The building's core operational rhythm is severely paralyzed by its dominant, massive 4BR inventory, which completely lacks a high-velocity buyer pool, resulting in destructive 76 to 312-day waits for mature resale clears and multi-year gaps between building trades. Despite this profound secondary friction, pricing has proven remarkably resilient on a long-term horizon, heavily compounding from 2003 conversion baselines (+50% to +89%). Investors must treat this strictly as a deeply illiquid store of value, avoiding the assumption that these massive footprints will offer efficient secondary exits or frictionless, high-margin rental yields.
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