The same old story at the Nouvelle auction
How am I not surprised by the big haircut the owners of the Nouvelle at Natick took at over the weekend?
For those unacquainted with what may be one of the bigger real estate fiascos of the downturn, the Nouvelle is a Back Bay style condo tower stuck in the heart of suburban mall country.
And, after managing to sell only a fraction of the mall tower's 215 condos after a year or so of traditional sales efforts, the owners auctioned off 55 units this past Saturday at prices far, far below their original, highly inflated, bubble-era asking prices.
For its part, the high-rise was a centerpiece of General Growth Properties campaign to go upscale with the old Natick Mall. The decidedly middle class retail complex was made over into the Natick Collection, with its very own downtown style condo high-rise to boot.
I guess someone thought there was a long line of wealthy suburbanites out there in Wellesley and the like who just couldn’t get enough of the mall during regular business hours and just had to live there.
Here’s a hint – most of those folks are heading east with their money towards Chestnut Hill, not west to Natick and Framingham.
Now some of this may be a guy thing – my wife would love to live at the mall and has told me so. Unfortunately for the Nouvelle, she couldn’t make the auction.
The results were predictable. The idea someone was going to plunk down $1.7 million to live at what most people still call the Natick Mall was preposterous to begin with, a product of housing bubble economics.
Now there are some cold hard facts to back up this common sense – the grand penthouse suite sold for $626,000. That’s more than a million off.
Ouch.
All told 55 units sold for $249,900 to $626,000.
Hindsight, of course, is quite convenient, and the bursting of the real estate bubble has made lots of people look silly.
Yet this was one slow motion train wreck that was not hard to see coming.
