Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - Recently, St. Lawrence Catholic Church on E Delavan Avenue in Buffalo sold for $975,000, which ended up being double the asking price. That's making many in the community wonder if former churches will become the next big thing in real estate.
"All of a sudden, buyers are coming out the woodwork, looking for buildings to develop and spaces to develop, and churches are relatively affordable," says Ayat Nieves of The Giambra Team.
He says a building like St. Lawrence goes for $25 per-square foot, which makes it priced to sell. Another factor that dictates the market is the location of the property.
"There was a church on Doat [Street] that listed for $300,000 several years ago, sold for $600,000 and several others that sold for about the same price per-square foot. So it was priced to sell, and it sold," Nieves said with WBEN.
What makes churches such a hot commodity?
"There's a lot of people moving to the area that are looking for affordable real estate, and when they see something like this, they get excited to come in, groups that come in waves," Nieves said. "We've had developers approach us, we've had other churches approach us, we've had schools approach us. Everybody wants a piece of the action."
Bill Heussler of Hanna Commercial Real Estate has been tracking church sales as well, and finds two reasons for the demand.
"One, the demand for housing is still strong, and the lack of inventory. So some people are looking at these facilities, trying to convert them to housing, whether it's affordable, condos, apartments, any sort of combination there. So I think these are nice properties for that, and also they're probably zoned so they don't have to worry about zoning. They're already in residential neighborhoods, and have a lot of attributes," said Huessler in an interview with WBEN.
Heussler believes St. Lawrence's sale price was more of an anomaly.
"We rarely go over asking and [there were] multiple bids. That was a great situation they had. Kudos to them for getting that kind of price," he said. "There are definitely going to be more churches on the market coming forward, so it'll be interesting to watch and see if they can command that kind of price as well."
Heussler is hesitant to say churches are a hot property.
"I think people are looking for different opportunities," Huessler explained. "I haven't seen the significant uptick, other than what we read about the diocese, but a lot of these are parishes, so we're not going to see so much. I don't know how high it's going to go. It'd be nice to see, but I think it's still out there. See if we can keep these prices high, and we'll certainly be looking at opportunities."
Heussler says developers are interested, but another group is interested.
"Different ethnic groups, we've seen a lot of different ethnicities come into their area, and they're all opening churches," he said. "And one interesting thing I found when they open churches now, they need housing, so it's almost a community kind of event. When different ethnicities move into a church area, they really kind of take over and live there and become very much part of the community."