'It's a Whole New Market'

“There is hardly a block you can drive down that’s not being worked on,” says Yvonne Maddox, who heads the newly opened office of Charles H. Greenthal real estate, the first of the city’s prestigious firms to open an office on 125th Street last year.

Indeed, workmen can be seen hauling debris and delivering construction materials on many Harlem streets throughout the day. On a tour of the neighborhood, Maddox points out a home in the Hamilton Heights section, a six-unit townhouse that she says was valued at around $200,000 just three years ago, but is on the market today for $750,000.

“It’s a whole new market,” she says, her voice almost giddy as she gives her stock tour of the neighborhood’s most beautiful blocks. “A lot of young people are Wall Streeters and they just hop the train downtown.”

Maddox says her clientele is “a real cross section,” some black, some white, some with roots in Harlem, some without. Many home shoppers are drawn by the comparative value of the neighborhood. “Where units on the Lower East Side are going for $1 million to $1.5 million, they can buy that same size house in Harlem for $200,000 to $600,000.”

She points out one home that had been abandoned for so long that a tree had grown inside. It just sold for more than $200,000, with the owners expecting to pay roughly $40,000 per floor for renovations, she says.

She points to a building, whose windows have been long filled with cinderblocks, and she compares it with a midtown home that just sold for $2.7 million. “People just don’t see the potential, they just see a mess,” she says.

On some blocks, all of the bargains have been snapped up, but on others, the transition is striking, with freshly painted, newly renovated mansions alongside burned-out shells not touched for years.

" This block is changing, it’s still reasonably priced,” she says passing by a side street off Fifth Avenue where young men sitting on a front step watch her black sedan pass by and some homes are still boarded up with weathered plywood.

Yvonne Maddox, head of the 125th Street office for the Charles H. Greenthal Real Estate Agency.

An original stairwell undergoing renovation inside a brownstone in the Astor Row section.