Victorian Flatbush Is Attracting Buyers Priced out of Trendy Brooklyn Neighborhoods

In summer 2015, a few months after selling her townhouse in formerly low-key Boerum Hill for $8.8 million, actress Michelle Williams drew attention to decidedly low-key Prospect Park South, where she snagged an eight-bedroom circa-1900 Colonial Revival mansion on Albemarle Road for $2.5 million. Part of a collection of micro-neighborhoods and historic districts occasionally referred to as Victorian Flatbush, Prospect Park South and nearby Ditmas Park are in a real estate sweet spot, attracting buyers priced out of Park Slope, Greenpoint, and even Crown Heights, says Jan Rosenberg, who founded the local agency Brooklyn Hearth Realty in 2004. New restaurants, bars, and coffee shops are opening in abundance on the commercial strips of Cortelyou Road and Church Avenue, which bookmark rows of leafy streets lined with Queen Anne, Victorian, Craftsman, and Colonial Revival houses. Renovated homes start at about $2 million, while houses in need of some TLC might run closer to $1.7 million, says Alexandra Reddish, who runs the real estate firm Mary Kay Gallagher, which listed the property that Williams purchased. Two-bedroom co-ops and condos range in price from $600,000 to $900,000, and money gets you even more farther south, where Reddish is listing a five-bedroom 1910 home with a columned front porch in West Midwood for $1.875 million and a six-bedroom home on .31 acres in Fiske Terrace for $2.495 million. The latter “needs work,” Reddish says, “but it’s an amazing piece of property. It’s like owning your own park in Brooklyn.”