A tiny section of Brooklyn’s Gravesend neighborhood is so popular with the Sephardic Jewish community that competition for limited inventory has driven prices to among the borough’s highest. Gravesend is largely known as a middle-class enclave, with median home prices slightly below Brooklyn’s median home price. But in the Sephardic stronghold — from Avenue S to Avenue U, between McDonald and Coney Island avenues — homes are trading for millions of dollars.
A seven-bedroom home on Ocean Parkway is currently asking $8.99 million, according to StreetEasy. The house was initially listed for $14 million last year, and had it sold at that price it would have been one of the borough’s most expensive home sales ever, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Indeed, several Gravesend homes have already traded for sky-high prices. A house on Avenue S, for example, sold for $10.25 million in 2011, the Journal said. And one on East 2nd Street sold for $10.26 million in 2009.
Prices in the Sephardic section are heavily influenced by its proximity to synagogues and Jewish community centers, brokers told the Journal.
“If you take some of these houses and put them anywhere else in Brooklyn, you would not get the same prices for them,” Athanasia DiMaggio, a broker with Re/Max, told the newspaper. [WSJ] – Hiten Samtani