Housing market

It's an anti-yuppification backlash in Brooklyn!

About 20 Brooklyn families are looking to share a house in a Brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood, where they can engage in communal behavior like shared meals and communal relaxation activities, according to the Brooklyn Paper.

Like much else in Brooklyn, this urban kibbutz lifestyle won't come cheap.  read more »

From a new report (PDF) by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the National Low Income Housing Coalition:

According to the most recent Census numbers, in the past year, the number of renter households in the United States increased by nearly 1 million. By contrast, the number of homeowner households increased by just 139,000. The ability for metropolitan area housing markets to accommodate this shift to rental will vary considerably.  read more »

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Need to buy in the Hamptons soon? There should be plenty to choose from. The inventory of unsold homes on the market there was up 4.6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the first of 2008 (and a remarkable 27.2 percent from the first quarter of 2007), according to a report from Miller Samuel and Prudential Douglas Elliman.

In the North Fork, inventory was up 10.2 percent quarterly and nearly 20 percent annually.

We'll have more on the Long Island housing market in tomorrow's Observer. Hint: Manhattan. That's all we'll say.

The number of Hamptons home sales dropped 28.8 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 through the first quarter of 2008, according to a new report from appraisal firm Miller Samuel. Sales dropped 42.4 percent annually in the first quarter.

At the same time, both median and average Hamptons home prices increased annually; and the inventory of unsold homes on the sales market increased both quarterly and annually.

In an epic article today on why the super rich are still spending superbly, the Times wrote that buyers have "already closed on 71 Manhattan apartments that each cost more than $10 million, compared with 17 apartments in that price range during all of 2007."

That stat was already outdated by lunchtime.

According to city records, an 11th-floor apartment at The Plaza sold this month for $45,100,956, which makes it the second most expensive apartment ever to close in New York. It's behind only Harry Macklowe's massive spread four floors down at the newly renovated hotel, and slightly beats the even $45 million that scary hedge fund guru Dan Loeb just paid for his 15 Central Park West penthouse.  read more »

The Times' hedonistic front-pager this morning on how the very rich keep on spending, never mind the downturn, mentions this Manhattan housing market tidbit:

Buyers this year have already closed on 71 Manhattan apartments that each cost more than $10 million, compared with 17 apartments in that price range during all of 2007.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago in The Observer's print edition about the resiliency of the luxury housing market here. The average luxury apartment sales price cleared $7.66 million in the first quarter of 2008, according to appraiser Miller Samuel and brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman.  read more »

A hit children's TV show will take you far in this town. Dora the Explorer co-creator Eric Weiner and wife Cherie Vogelstein, a playwright, have bought a high-floor, seven-room condo at Ariel West, the new glass tower on West 99th Street and Broadway. According to city records, they paid $4.395 million.

Besides their four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bathroom, 2,881-square-foot apartment, the Upper West Side writer couple will have an in-building spa, plus a 51-foot-long swimming pool--though, you know, what self-respecting Upper West Side writer couple doesn't have one of those nowadays?

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As the summer Hamptons season creeps closer, here's how housing prices there started 2008.

The luxury numbers below are taken from a fourth quarter 2007 report (PDF) authored by Jonathan Miller for Prudential Douglas Elliman.  read more »

Socialite and founder of the Sotheby's fashion department Tiffany Dubin bought a $3.4 million, ninth-floor co-op in her building at 29 East 64th Street from venture capitalist Jean Francois Astier, city records show.

This is her third acquisition in the building in nine months. Ms. Dubin's ex-husband, Louis, transfered ownership of two adjoining fifth-floor co-ops to her last August, after a protracted divorce. We wonder what Ms. Dubin, who is the stepdaughter of former Sotheby's chairman Alfred Taubman, plans to do with her new place all the way on the ninth floor.  read more »

The Real Deal reports that more New York condo owners are falling behind on paying their buildings' common charges:

Bruce Cholst, a partner at Rosen & Livingston who specializes in co-op and condo law, said he has seen an increase in the volume and frequency of warning letters sent to condo owners for fee delinquency over the past six months. He said many of those owners heed the warnings, but end up back in arrears a couple months later.  read more »

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Condo and co-op prices dropped in brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods like Carroll Gardens and Park Slope in the first quarter of 2008, according to a new report from the Corcoran Group. Manhattan owners—and those who can afford to be some day—should take note.

The average sales price of Brooklyn condos and co-ops combined dropped 10 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 through the first of 2008 to $615,000. The median price dropped as well, 7 percent to $549,000.  read more »

That was the number of condo and co-op sales in Manhattan in the first quarter of 2007, according to appraisal firm Miller Samuel. Only two other quarters since at least the late 1980's--the second and third quarters of 2007--have topped that sales amount. Will the first quarter of 2008 top it? Stay tuned.

Mild schadenfreude greeted the Bloomberg News story this morning that Manhattan home sales dipped in January and February compared to the same time period last year. See the thread of comments on Curbed here.

But a closer look at the perfunctory numbers reveals... what exactly?  read more »

Next Tuesday is April 1, and the first-quarter housing market reports for Manhattan will start trickling out from brokerages like Halstead, Corcoran and Douglas Elliman. What will they say about home sales?

No one knows for certain, of course, but the speculation should pick up noticably in the next few days so here goes:

The first quarter of any year is usually relatively paltry in terms of the number of closed deals because those deals were cut in the winter months, which are normally among the slowest in Manhattan housing.  read more »

The Wall Street Journal reports in depth this morning on what anyone following at home probably realized was inevitable: a drop in home prices because of all the foreclosed homes on the market. Simply put, the new supply is driving down the costs to buyers.  read more »

When the double-wide townhouse at 14-16 East 67th Street (known as the Guccione Mansion until last year, when a smart broker changed the name to Milbank) went to contract last month, the New York Post sighed that the buyer, hedge fund titan Philip Falcone, managed to "whittle the $59 million asking price down to well below the current townhouse record of $53 million."

Still, according to city records filed this morning, Mr. Falcone and his wife, Lisa, paid $49 million--the third highest sum ever paid for a townhouse in New York City--for the 27-room house. It belonged to Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione until he essentially lost the house to foreclosure in 2006. (As it actually happened, he had to sell to investors led by Laurus Funds, who had bailed him out back in 2004 with a high-interest loan, the very day there was a moving van outside the pornographer's house.)  read more »

Doorman co-ops in Manhattan now average $1.37 a square foot in maintenance fees and non-doorman ones $1.22 a foot, according to analysis by appraisal firm Miller Samuel and reporting by The New York Times. The shorthand for co-op maintenance fees used to be $1 a square foot.

One might have assumed that New York Nets co-owner Bruce Ratner does not adore the pettite charm of brownstones. After all, his planned 8 million-square-foot, 22-acre Atlantic Yards, which would be one of the biggest projects ever built by a single developer in New York, has been called "a nightmare for Brooklyn" because of its massive bouquet of Frank Gehry-designed skyscrapers.

But, according to city records, Mr. Ratner just bought himself a nice little 20-foot-wide, 6,408-square-foot, five-floor brownstone, exactly the kind that Brooklynites like so much. But it's on the Upper East Side.

On Valentine's Day, Mr. Ratner paid $6,965,000 for 128 East 62nd Street. More than half of the townhouse was owned by the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass, founded by the late Dr. Egon Neustadt--who used to live in the house with some of his 300,000-piece Tiffany collection, according to Milton Hassol, the musuem's president.  read more »

The Real Deal's Data Book 2008 tumbled from our mailbox last night. Among the myriad of factoids was this one: The average sales price of an East Side Manhattan townhouse increased 317 percent from 1997 through 2007 to over $10.63 million. The average sales price for a West Side townhouse increased 227 percent to $4.61 million. And, 10 years ago, your average downtown townhouse would've cost $1.2 million, give or take. Now?  read more »

For the last 28 years, Jeremiah Oshea has been the super at 18 East 68th Street, the 36-foot-wide, 18,500-square-foot, 103-year-old mansion that just hit the market asking $64 million.

He lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment in the basement; the limestone mansion, now divided into apartments, has 17-foot ceilings and original wood paneling.

When asked about the listing, Mr. Oshea, from Ireland’s County Kerry, said, “I think it is on the market, I’m not told whether it is or whether it isn’t, but I have a feeling it is.” I mentioned that the asking price is $64 million: “Oh my God,” he said.  read more »

If the diamond-brooched Upper East Side brokers all give up their chauffeured Rolls-Royces for scooters, is it a sign that the Manhattan real estate apocalypse really is nigh?

Corcoran senior vice president Sharon Baum, who briefly dated Michael Bloomberg after graduating from Harvard Business School in 1965, has been chauffeured to and from her $20 million listings in a Rolls-Royce for the last 12 years.

Her license plate says SOLD 1. So does a matching diamond brooch.  read more »

When 40 Barrow Street went on the market back in August, Curbed wondered whether there were any "solvent hedge-funders left out there" who could afford to pay the $10 million for the charming, two-family townhouse and give it the restoration it deserves. Apparently, it's a job for an artist.

The famed Mexican installation artist Gabriel Orozco and his wife Maria Gutierrez paid $8.85 million for 40 Barrow Street, according to city records.  read more »

Each absurdly wealthy family is absurdly wealthy in its own way.Take Ira Rennert, who parlayed junk bonds and Hummer uber-vehicles into a slot (#891) on the list of the world's billionaires, not to mention an oceanic estate in the Hamptons (and, farther away, an equally-sized smelting plant in Peru, and a highly-polluting Missouri plant). Mr.  read more »

The exclamatory independent news program Democracy Now! won’t be broadcasting out of a Chinatown firehouse for much longer.

According to city records, the left-leaning TV/radio group (Newt Gingrich once told co-host/founder Amy Goodman that he warned his mother not to speak to reporters because of people like her) have paid $6 million for a raw loft at 217 West 25th Street.  read more »

Oh, Ira Rennert! What a guy.

I wrote last month that the man who has an $185 million Hamptons compound and a few massive smelting plants in Peru and Missouri (plus, of course, a billion-dollar fortune from junk bonds and Hummer vehicles) had bought two $30 million-plus apartments for his two daughters.

This afternoon, the more spectacular of the deals was registered in public records, for all future ages to behold. Daughter Tamara Winn and her husband just closed on a $32 million duplex at 740 Park, the Bethlehem of uptown co-ops.

No mortgages have been filed yet, which suggests it could have been an all-cash deal: Mr. Rennert, you're a good dad.

UPDATE: Daughter #2 closes too.

The average sales price per square foot for housing in the New York City metropolitan area was $289.79 in November 2007, according to the latest monthly report (PDF) from research firm Radar Logic Inc.  read more »

The Giants had their ticker-tape parade this morning. The last time the city hosted a ticker-tape parade was for the World Series champion Yankees in October 2000. Back then, the median price for a Manhattan co-op was $340,000, according to research firm Radar Logic Inc. The median price for a condo was $535,000.

In the midst of the worst economic crisis in six decades (according to George Soros), the tip-top of Manhattan's high-end did awfully well yesterday.  read more »

Prudential Douglas Elliman's fourth-quarter Manhattan housing market report, authored by appraiser Jonathan Miller, is now available online (PDF). It showed, among other stats, that apartment prices had ascended to an all-time average high of over $1.4 million.

On Jan. 2, things weren't looking all that bright for Jonathan Tisch, New York Giants co-owner (and, ahem, the heir to the multi-billion-dollar Loews fortune). His team was headed into the playoffs, where they hadn't had a win since 2001.

But, according to city records filed this afternoon, Mr. Tisch closed that day on a massive apartment deal, selling his unlisted duplex at ritzy 950 Fifth Avenue to Starbucks founder and CEO Howard Schultz (and his wife Sheri) for $24.75 million. The Giants have won two massive games since then, and are a match away from the Super Bowl. Maybe Mr. Tisch's good mood was contagious?  read more »

The Atlantic's Matthew Yglesias this month analyzed the fallout from the mortgage-lending crisis and found an interesting aside: Some of the same people who made a killing trading in subprime mortgage debt may be losing their homes, if they haven't lost them already:

(45 residences in Greenwich, Connecticut, home to many hedge-fund operators and investment bankers, were in foreclosure in the third quarter of 2007)

Goldman Sachs partner Alan Shuch paid $8.2 million for a condo at Fifteen Central Park West, according to city records on Thursday. Mr. Shuch, who is head of assett management at the firm, and Leslie Wohlman are listed as the buyers of apartment 26D on the Jan. 4 property deed.

Another Goldman partner, Ashok Varadhan, purchased a $16.03 million condo at the Zeckendorf brothers' famed buidling just two days earlier.

Manhattan's apartment market remained relatively strong in 2007, with rent jumps averaging between 2.2 percent and 6.5 percent in most apartment sizes, according to a new report from The Real Estate Group New York.  read more »

A totally anecdotal tale we've had with us all day:

We were walking out of our apartment building in Morningside Heights (the area around Columbia University) on Sunday when we encountered a crowd of roughly 20 people streaming into and out of a first-floor apartment. They were young and eager...

And merely the first clump of people we encountered, for outside, spilled onto the sidewalk were another 20 or so people. They were waiting to view the apartment up for lease.

That's right: 40 people, 1 apartment.  read more »

Outside of bubbly Manhattan, millions of Americans are hurting after a brutal year of subprime mortgage woes. (President Bush tried to help last month by introducing a toll-free tip hotline for homeowners, but the number he gave was for Texas' Freedom Christian Academy.)

And so today, the country's largest animal protection organization had this message for worried Americans: "With a foreclosure crisis sweeping the nation, The Humane Society of the United States is disturbed by reports that some residents forced out of their homes are simply leaving their pets behind. The HSUS urges all pet owners faced with foreclosure to take their pets with them when they relocate."  read more »

The Corcoran Group's Brooklyn regional vice president, Frank Percesepe, talked to The Observer about some of the trends that pushed the average price of an apartment up 8 percent in the borough in 2007, according to the firm's year-end market report.

"If you look at the numbers, there is nice, mature growth in all neighborhoods," he said.

The report covered the neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, Boerum Hill, Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, Park Slope, Williamsburg, and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

"If the price of a two-bedroom in Park Slope dropped a little," Mr. Percesepe said, "it's because inventory went down not because the market was performing badly."  read more »

The owner of one of Williamsburg's biggest brokerage firms, Aptsandlofts.com, said that the Corcoran Group's 2007 market report was "wrong" in estimating that the average price of a condo in the neighborhood had increased 8 percent since 2006.

David Maundrell told The Observer on Friday afternoon that "there was no way" that the average price of a condo in the Williamsburg market had risen from $817,000 in 2006 to $880,000 in 2007, as the Corcoran report concludes.

"Their data is wrong. We've seen the market come down 10 to 12 percent across the board since it peaked in the beggining of 2006," he said.  read more »

The average price of a condo in Park Slope, Brooklyn's answer to the West Village, increased by 8 percent year-over-year, from $591,000 in 2006 to $640,000 in 2007, according to the year-end market report released by the Cocoran Group earlier this week. Here are some more Park Slope figures from the report:  read more »

The average price of an apartment in Brooklyn rose 8 percent during 2007 to $661,000, according to a report from the Corcoran Group released on Wednesday. Here are some more Brooklyn tidbits:  read more »

Here's a look at condo and co-op sales in the fourth quarter of 2007 from the Radar Logic-Prudential Douglas Elliman report.  read more »

Luxury apartments drove the Manhattan housing market in the fourth quarter of 2007. Here's some nuggets from the Radar Logic-Prudential Douglas Elliman report:  read more »

The average sales price for a Manhattan condo has grown by nearly $800,000 this decade, marching to $1,750,634 by the end of 2007, according to a report from brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman and research firm Radar Logic. That's an 89 percent increase from the year-end average in 2000, and is 17.8 percent above the fourth-quarter average in 2006.

Significantly, this upward march of condo prices included September 11. After the terrorist attacks, much of Manhattan's residential real estate market softened amid a cascade of pessimism about the city's ability to fully recover.  read more »

Housing data collected in October offers further evidence (as if any is needed) that the bubble has burst in cities across the country, except New York, where it has only begun to slowly deflate.

New York is one of three cities where property prices continued to increase during the third quarter of 2007, as housing markets in 19 other major US metropilatan areas deteriorated, according to the RPX Monthly Housing Report for October 2007 (PDF). Of the 25 metropolitan areas surveyed, only three markets saw residential prices rise more than 1 percent in October 2007, compared to the same month last year. Three of the markets surveyed remained stable.  read more »

The commute in this morning revealed a city largely in slumber--quiet, roomier subway cars and sidewalks as sweeping as Midwestern plains.

But, before the end of this businessweek, expect a flurry of residential real estate activity. The last month or so has been spent in prognostication of 2008 to come and remembrance of 2007 past. But all that was done without hard numbers, and those hard numbers come by Friday from major brokerages like the Corcoran Group, Prudential Douglas Elliman and Halstead Property.  read more »

Tough 38-year-old Rangers forward Brendan Shanahan is doing well for himself. Last night he scored a game-winning overtime goal to beat the hallowed Montreal Canadiens (whose star Chris Higgins took a college Spanish class with this reporter a few years back).

And on Christmas Eve, according to a deed filed in city records today, Mr. Shanahan and his wife closed on a $13.44 million full-floor apartment at the newly-redone 823 Park Avenue condo.  read more »

Suze Orman, the well-tanned finance guru, who writes huge-selling books like You've Earned It, Don't Lose It and The Courage to Be Rich, once said she was simply aghast at real estate mania. Rampant condo speculation, she intoned, was a sure sign Americans were “losing their minds.”

But a deed filed today show that trusts in the name of Ms. Orman and her partner Kathy (“get yourself a living revocable trust” was Ms.  read more »

2007 was the year of the closet.

Back in March, Robert De Niro's wife Grace Hightower sold a 67-square-foot closet at Trump Palace for $13,000, about twice what she paid in 2003. Then in November, Google god Craig Nevill-Manning bought some storage space for one of his two penthouses, paying $85,000. And don't forget that Lionel Pincus is asking $50 million for a Pierre duplex with 35 closets.

But that's nothing. In September, the banking heir John L. Loeb Jr., once our loyal ambassador to Denmark, paid $5.58 million for a 6.5-room, 1,600-square-foot apartment at the high-heeled 480 Park Avenue co-op. His buyer, the deed shows, is Mexican-born art patron Leon Constantiner, whose collection reportedly includes a massive quantity of Marilyn Monroe snapshots. Mr. Loeb, on the other hand, is said to have built up the heftiest collection of 19th-century Danish art outside of the country.  read more »

The Observer's media blog had a pre-Christmas post on the continued popularity of TV shows about residential real estate, despite the housing market calamities of recent months:

...[W]hile residential real estate has slowed down significantly in markets around the country, its television equivalent is showing no sign of flagging.  read more »

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The best place to come from, if you want a fair crack at buying really immense Manhattan condos, is either the United Arab Emirates or the Internet.

City records filed this week show that Sultan Ahmed Al-Qassimi, who apparently belongs to the ruling family of Sharjah--Dubai's neighboring emirate--spent $4.95 million late last month on a low-floor apartment at the Robert A.M. Stern-designed Fifteen Central Park West. (Tune into this week's Manhattan Transfers column to read about a haute broker who bought a place one flight up.)

But across the park, that was overshadowed by a mystery buyer named CPW EXODUS REALTY, LLC, whose October deed for a $16.6 million apartment purchase was filed in city records four minutes later than Mr. Al-Qassimi's.  read more »

Wall Street executive Richard Cantor paid $13.9 million for an apartment in the star-studded Fifteen Central Park West, according to city records. The deed lists Mr. Cantor and wife Pamela as the buyers of apartment 12C in the Robert A.M. Stern-designed building.

According to a New York Times story in March 2000, Mr. Cantor had recently retired from active management of money-management firm Neuberger Berman Inc. He served as vice chairman once retired. Ms. Cantor, according to the Times, is a psychiatrist.