Why this West Village “townhouse” was a hard sell

14 minutes read

The red brick townhouse at 197 West Houston Street seems to have it all: real oak floors, a working wood-burning fireplace and a hidden back garden surrounded by leaf-vined walls.

A listing for the home touted “a rare opportunity to experience true townhouse living,” and with an asking price of just $1,875 per square foot, the property was seeking 30 percent off the area’s average going rate for townhomes.

There’s just one catch: it comes with another person living in it.

That large — or rather, person-sized — caveat explains why the home has spent a year on the market and gone through a number of deals that fell apart at the last minute, according to Serhant’s Frayda Resnick, who has had the listing. This month, the home finally closed for $2.1 million.

The deed to the two-family home is set up as a tenancy-in-common, where two parties have 50-50 ownership over the deed, a setup that real estate attorney Andrew Luftig called “highly unique in New York City.”

“A lot of trust goes into this, you’re owning the whole property together with somebody you don’t know,” he said. “There are typically agreements, but they’re pretty loose.”

The trophy property upstairs

In the case of 197 West Houston, the original tenant-in-common agreement dated back to the 1960s, when Guggenheim Fellow-winning physicist Josef Eisinger and his wife, cellist Styra Avins, bought the property with their friends to help carry the cost of the building. The two families agreed to switch off paying taxes each month and sharing responsibilities for the common areas, including the private back garden.

But when the downstairs unit decided to sell, the home turned into an awkward living configuration for potential buyers.

Perhaps most importantly, it became nearly impossible to get a mortgage. Unlike a co-op, where a bank can collateralize an individual unit’s shares, there’s only one deed, meaning the whole home would need to be used as collateral — an unrealistic expectation for the other owner of the property.

Last summer, Resnick had an interested buyer who had toured the home and was ready to sign, but couldn’t get financing. As a last resort, they tried to buy out the upstairs unit — occupied by the 101-year-old Eisinger and Avins — but were turned down. Eisinger died months later, and Avins has maintained she doesn’t want to sell, according to Resnick, who has since “come to realize we’re only showing it to cash buyers.”

The tantalizing appeal of owning the entire townhouse was part of what drew the current sellers of the downstairs unit, when they bought into the property in 2017 for $2 million. After spending roughly half a million on renovations, the seller’s two sons moved in to live there while attending school, but the family had eyes on the upstairs unit.

“He figured when [the upstairs owners] passed, he could take over the home, renovate it, and flip it, which would be a developer’s dream right now,” Resnick said of the current seller. “The upstairs has access to a roof deck, but they’re not renovating it or taking advantage of it. And the upstairs is a duplex three-bedroom — so it would make a trophy property.”

Almost 10 years later, that dream hasn’t come to pass. The sons have moved back to California, and the downstairs unit owner resigned himself to selling rather than being a landlord indefinitely.

Creative buyer combinations

The dilemma the sellers found themselves in is still rare around the city, but as affordability has put standard homeownership increasingly out of reach, sharing the costs of a single property has become more appealing, according to Luftig.

“You’re hearing it more,” he said. “The cost of buying in our city is expensive, and most younger people don’t have the cash.”

Corcoran’s Roni Rose says she has developed a niche of friends buying townhouses together and has done more than five such deals since her first in 2022.

“Prices have gone up, and people want homes,” she said. Her clients entering into shared living arrangements have also gone to lengths to set up agreements that make it easier to sell, using a route established by the state attorney general’s office that allows for fully-owner-occupied buildings with fewer than five units to apply to convert the building into condos when the time comes.

“It’s a super smart way to get more home than you can afford,” said Compass’ Bridget Harvey, who said she worked with two friends buying a 4,000-square-foot townhouse in Harlem for around $2.7 million in 2024.

But at 197 West Houston, the agreements date back over half a century, which has left the sellers marketing the home, idiosyncrasies and all.

After initially listing the home for $2.5 million last May, Resnick dropped the price to $2.25 million after she found most people came in expecting a full townhouse at the higher price. Even then, Resnick had a series of false starts from buyers that couldn’t get past the various quirks of the arrangement (the garden, which many potential buyers have wanted to update but is shared 50-50, has been a sticking point).

At the end of last year, Resnick finally found a buyer who could pay in cash and was willing to accept the setup, she said. They also waived the certificate of occupancy after a competing offer came in after the contract was signed in January.

The deal still took another five months to close as the sellers had to wait for the upstairs unit’s right of first refusal period to expire and the upstairs unit came back with a series of demands (Avins did request that the buyer get a CO, and the buyer got a $75,000 credit for the cost).

“I didn’t realize all the complications until we had actual offers on the table,” Resnick said. “Here we are negotiating with the seller and an upstairs neighbor who’s not even a seller.”

Resnick said the buyers initially hoped to be able to buy out the top half at some point as well, but Avins told them she hopes to keep the property in the family going forward.

“We just found the perfect buyers, because nobody else would have agreed to this,” Resnick said.