251 West 89th Street (The Admaston)

The building occupies a 150-foot Broadway frontage on an approximately 15,105-square-foot lot and carries about 121,500 square feet of building area — roughly 1,690 gross square feet per residential unit, which is an unusual ratio in a 72-unit pre-war condominium and is the structural reason apartments here read larger than their unit count suggests. Sale records from the building over the past two decades include apartments in the 1,200-square-foot range and apartments well over 2,000 square feet, with the largest configurations concentrated in the corner and court-facing lines.

The Blums organized the plan around large inner and outer courts, which is what produces light and cross-ventilation on the interior lines of a building this deep. The offering plan's building description records the exterior as granite and glazed brick with decorative stone trim, red common brick at the courts and rear elevations, wood double-hung windows in 6-over-1 and 8-over-1 patterns depending on elevation, a front fire escape, and a mineral-surfaced roll roof. Because the building is not landmarked, window replacement and façade work do not require Landmarks review — a real cost and timeline advantage relative to the West End Avenue and Riverside Drive co-op stock a few blocks west, most of which sits inside designated districts.

Vertical circulation is the building's one pre-war constraint. The plan describes one automatic self-service passenger elevator and one manually controlled service elevator serving twelve stories. Confirm the current configuration and any elevator modernization history with the managing agent.

The Admaston runs as a staffed pre-war condominium with a live-in superintendent, a resident staff, and a central laundry. Payroll is by a wide margin the largest line in the budget — the approved 2024 operating budget on file runs a little under $2.0 million, and payroll and related costs account for roughly two-thirds of it. That is a normal shape for a staffed twelve-story building of this size, but it is worth understanding before underwriting: common charges here fund people more than they fund amenities, because there are effectively no amenities beyond the laundry.

The more useful signal in the budget is what sits below the operating line. The 2024 budget carries a capital-improvement program of roughly $700,000 for the year against roughly $420,000 of non-operating income — a building spending materially on capital work and drawing on reserves or assessment to do it, and running a projected cash deficit after capital spending. The prior two years show the same posture, with capital spending above $1.0 million in one of them. This is not a distress signal; it reads as a condominium working through a deferred-maintenance and compliance cycle on a 1911 structure. It is, however, the first question to ask: what the current capital plan covers, whether an assessment is live, where reserves stand, and what the Local Law 11 façade cycle and Local Law 97 emissions position look like for a building of this age and fuel profile.

The commercial unit carries 3.82 percent of common interest. Retail income and the commercial unit's cost allocation both flow through the budget, and the residential/commercial split is stated explicitly in it — a cleaner arrangement than the informal allocations found in many pre-war conversions.

Ownership form. Condominium. On a resale the board's remedy is a right of first refusal, not an approval vote — the transactional advantage that separates the Admaston from nearly all of the comparable pre-war inventory on the surrounding blocks, which is cooperative.

Non-purchasing tenants. The plan was a non-eviction plan, and all 72 residential units were rent-regulated when it was offered. Rent-regulated occupancy attaching to a unit is now rare here, but it is not impossible; verify the occupancy status of any specific apartment at contract.

Financing. No published maximum-financing percentage. Standard condominium lending applies. The sponsor's own financing program at conversion was available to outside purchasers only and has no bearing on a resale today.

Flip tax. None documented in the plan reviewed. Confirm in writing — boards add transfer fees by amendment, and the absence of one in a 1985 plan is not proof of its absence in 2026.

House rules, pets, and subletting. Not documented in the materials on file. Pull the current house rules and the current board resolution set from the managing agent at offer stage.

Recent sales

Recent closings at this building, from The Roebling Research Library. Prices are the transfer amounts recorded with the NYC Department of Finance; apartment-level detail is checked against the building’s own file in The Roebling Research Library before publishing.

Market read. Most recent trades (2026) cleared a median $1,309/sf (floor-adjusted) across 3 sales. Floor-adjusted means each sale is restated to a constant mix of floors, so the figure can differ from the plain median of the sales listed above. Median listing discount 2.5% from the last ask — a recurring negotiation gap worth pricing into any offer or listing strategy.

Sales sourced from NYC Department of Finance recorded transfers (BBL 1-01237-7501). Apartment-level facts (line, condition, asking-price context) curated and cross-verified in The Roebling Research Library. Not all transactions cross-verify with ACRIS records — sponsor and LLC purchases sometimes record at stipulated values rather than market price; square footage from recorded condo declarations and offering plans.

You are buying condominium liquidity in a co-op corridor. Between 86th and 96th Streets west of Broadway, the pre-war stock is overwhelmingly cooperative. A pre-war condominium of this size and quality is a structurally scarce product, and it prices accordingly on the way out as well as on the way in.

Underwrite the capital plan, not the common charge. The budget on file shows sustained capital spending funded partly from non-operating income. Ask for the current capital plan, the reserve balance, the assessment history, and the Local Law 11 and Local Law 97 status before you price.

Condition variance is the whole game. A tenanted 1985 conversion produces a building of forty-year-old renovations sitting next to two-year-old ones. Price the apartment, not the address.

Not landmarked is worth money. Window replacement, façade repairs, and storefront work here do not go through Landmarks. That is a genuine cost and schedule advantage over the designated blocks nearby.

Elevator capacity is a pre-war reality. One passenger elevator across twelve floors, as described in the plan. Confirm the current configuration and modernization history.

Lead with the architecture and the ownership form. George & Edward Blum, 1911, twelve stories on the Broadway corner, condominium — that combination is rare enough to be the headline.

Lead with the room count. The building was designed for sixty families of five to eight rooms. Even after subdivision, the apartments are large by corridor standards. Square footage and room count sell this building better than amenity language it does not have.

Get ahead of the capital question. Sophisticated buyers and their attorneys will read the budget. Have the current capital plan, reserve position, and assessment status in hand before you list; ambiguity here costs more in negotiation than disclosure does.

Price against the right set. The comparables are the pre-war condominiums and the largest pre-war co-op apartments between 86th and 96th, not the post-war full-service condominiums on Broadway.

If you're considering The Admaston, also evaluate:

• 250 West 89th Street — the full-service condop directly across the street; 1986 new construction, a completely different product at the same intersection
• 267 West 89th Street — 1910 pre-war cooperative on the same block, in the brown-brick-and-limestone register
• 317 West 89th Street — 1914 pre-war building converted to condominium; the closest ownership-form comparable on the street
• 320 West 89th Street — George F. Pelham's 1921–22 cooperative, the larger pre-war co-op alternative on the block
• 215 West 88th Street — 2008 condominium conversion of a 1915 building; a direct pre-war-condominium peer one block south
• 255 West 90th Street — Neville & Bagge's 1909 cooperative, converted from rental in 1981
• 2460 Broadway — Schwartz & Gross, 1917; the Broadway-corner pre-war co-op comparable
• 2480 Broadway — Rosario Candela's 1922 Broadway cooperative, at the top of the corridor's pre-war tier
• 670 West End Avenue — George & Edward Blum, 1926; the architects' mature West Side work, in cooperative form
• 760 West End Avenue — another 1926 Blum building, converted from rental in 1982
• 241 West 108th Street — a 1911 Blum cooperative of the same year as the Admaston, uptown and at smaller scale