House Hunting In Forest Hills With $1M, NYTimes Reports

FOREST HILLS, QUEENS — Earlier this year, Diana Erben and Ben Scheck began looking for a kind of New York real estate white whale: A quiet, sunny, three-bedroom, one-office home in Queens with a private yard and parking spot, located walking distance to the subway — all for under $1 million.

While $1 million is no small amount to spend on a home, it is the cap for avoiding the city's mansion tax, although many of the places they saw at that price tag were in "rough shape," the New York Times reported.

Ultimately, the couple, who were living in Astoria at the time, narrowed their options down to three main contenders: A recently renovated three-bedroom rowhouse in Jackson Heights for $999K, a slightly-dated four-bedroom brick house in Forest Hills for $999K, and an LIRR-adjacent five-bedroom house in Kew Gardens for $998K.

They offered the asking price in Jackson Heights, but the owner sold the house to a family friend, and weren't picked for the house in Forest Hills — even though they upped their offer to $1.005 million.

Heartbroken, the couple considered putting a bid on the Kew Gardens house, but they couldn't get the Forest Hills home out of their minds.

“We were comparing every other house to this one," Erben said — which is why the call from their agent that the Forest Hills sale had fallen through was "the best call we could have ever gotten."

While the couple has had to make some renovations on the house, listing broker, John Amore, of Prime Realty, said that it was a good price for Forest Hills, where similar homes typically go for upwards of $1.1 million. "[Forest Hills is] one of the hottest areas in Queens," he told the Times.

For a price-tag of just under $1 million, the couple ultimately bought their home at a comparable cost to NYC's median home price, which is $949,000 on average, according to real estate website StreetEasy.

In Forest Hills, however, there are much more affordable homes — so much so that StreetEasy recently named the neighborhood the most accessible in Queens for first-time home buyers, and among the city's top-two most affordable areas to look for a first home overall.

But, as more New Yorkers move from densely populated areas in the city into single-family homes in the outer boroughs, the affordability of Forest Hills isn't guaranteed to stay. As of early Oct. rents are already on the rise.

Read the full New York Times article here.

Related Article: Forest Hills Is The Best Queens Area For Young Home Buyers: Study