NEW YORK—Williamsburg has come up a lot since David Maundrell was a kid. Growing up several blocks away from the Lorimer subway stop, Maundrell always remembers it as a quiet part of town.
Then, in the early 90s, he noticed that people started coming out of the subway station at night. That part of town had become livelier as young creative types began moving in.
And that’s when he told his girlfriend, now his wife, “If I had money I’d buy every building in this area.” Today Maundrell is president of Apartments and Lofts. With a team of about 50 people, the company consults and has marketed over 100 new developments in North Brooklyn.
“As you can see in the past four years, there’s been an explosion of construction here in Williamsburg, and I saw that five years ago,” said Maundrell. Four years ago there were only a handful of condominium buildings, now there are over 50, according to Maundrell. Several of those buildings are owned by Apartments and Lofts.
Though they rent and sell property in Greenpoint, Park Slope, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, and Long Island City, they are still deeply rooted in Williamsburg.
Maundrell says that those who flock to Williamsburg are mainly creative professionals in their twenties and thirties.
“Graphic designers, people in Internet, people working for advertising firms, architects, a lot of attorneys—people who might wear suits during the day but have a creative edge to them,” is how Maundrell describes area residents.
The Virtues of Buying
“When you look back at this period of time five years from now, people who buy now will be very happy they did,” Maundrell says.” Williamsburg is still evolving and growing. It’s an old neighborhood but the people who are living here now just started moving here in the early 90s.”
In five years, he thinks Williamsburg will be a “brand new city” and people will see a return on their investment.
He speaks from personal experience. Maundrell bought his apartment a month after 9/11. “I knew it was a good deal, and I just closed my eyes and I went for it,” said Maundrell. “It’s panned out for me very, very well. Right now my apartment is worth double what I paid for. I think people should look at this time as an opportunity.”
Williamsburg, Alive
Williamsburg offers what many other neighborhoods don’t—a real community. Long Island City is a bedroom community—you go home to sleep and there’s not much to do.
“I live in Dumbo, Brooklyn and I have a fantastic park, but there’s no real sense of neighborhood there at all,” says Maundrell. “It seems like people work during the day in the city and come home at night to their apartment.”
Williamsburg is traditionally home to Hispanics, Italians, Hasidic Jews, and the Polish, with sections dedicated to each. Now the ethnic groups in the area have become more blended, according to Maundrell, who says that “Williamsburg is a diverse neighborhood. It really feels like New York.”
One of the features of what Apartments and Lofts offers is exactly what their name suggests: they sell and rent both apartments and lofts, which compose about a quarter of their inventory. The beauty of a loft, which is an empty, high-ceilinged space resembling a warehouse, is that it lets the resident put up their own rooms.
“People do crazy things,” says Maundrell. “People take their apartments and add second floors to them when they’re not supposed to because the ceilings are so high. We’ve seen people take out every wall and do crazy finishes; we’ve seen people rip out the finishes they just paid for and put in something even more higher-end.”
Nearly 60 percent of Maundrell’s customers are former Manhattanites who want to stay close to Manhattan. Williamsburg is one stop from the east side of Manhattan from the Bedford Ave. L train stop. Another 30 to 35 percent are native to Brooklyn.
