Most people know that when a property isn’t moving many times a great way to jump start sales is to lower prices. When you get into new construction, especially in places where most units compare to each other, the last move people want to make is lower prices.

There are two major reasons for this. The first, is obviously, lowering prices lowers your profits. That’s easy. The second, and why this applies to new construction more than existing, is that when you lower prices you lower comps. If a builder lowers prices they’ve lowered values to the properties that have already been sold. I don’t see too many instances where this makes people that have already bought happy.

Which brings us to the Brownstones on Grand. Pretty cool project, pretty lousy sales. According to the Polk County Assessor, there were two units sold between Jan. 07 and July 07. Here’s the details:

• Unit 119 sold in January for $446,958
• Unit 201 sold in July for $439,560

Both of these units had 2,037 square feet, so they should be fairly comparable. I do know that the unit sold in January was the model unit, and it was sold to an investor that lives in Arizona.

For a project the size of the Brownstones on Grand you would surely hope to see better sales figures than these over 7 months. So to improve sales, they went the way of the slasher. Here’s how August of 07 looked.

• Unit 105 sold for $360,980
• Unit 111 sold for $350,790
• Unit 117 sold for $349,540

There you go. Sales went up, after prices came down (just a bit)! Oh, and did I mention that the units sold in August were bigger than the two that had previously sold? These last three had 2,058 square feet. Yikes! Look at it, unit 117 has a nearly $95,000 discount to the most expensive smaller unit, 119.

Of course, in a project of this size 5 total sales through 9 months is hardly something to brag about, especially when more than 1/2 your sales came after a steep discount.

Now I should mention that there is the possibility that the first two units to sell were heavily upgraded hence the more than $80,000 cost. OR they weren’t upgraded and those two people got to take a bath for that amount.

I don’t know where the Brownstones are currently priced, but they didn’t sell any units in September. Perhaps another wave of deals is on the way? And if prices are cut again, will the people that have already bought be happy about it?