This much we know: In Manhattan, there is a growing supply of empty apartments that, due to a combination of overpricing, bad timing and lack of demand, cannot find tenants willing to sign the dotted line. This is unfamiliar territory for landlords, who have conducted business in an environment that, for the past several years, has been defined by escalating rents; insatiable consumer demand driven by a robust local economy; and ever shrinking vacancy rates.

Yes, it’s not as easy to find renters as it used to be, but brokers and other industry professionals are still confident that the Manhattan rental market will steady itself in the near future.  read more »

Massey Knakal chairman Bob Knakal has one word for New York property investors post-boom: Transportation.

“The closer your property is to a major transportation system, the better,” Mr. Knakal said Monday. “Any areas that are in or around transportation hubs in the boroughs will be good investments in the future.”

As the epochal financial crisis shakes the chaff from the wheat, it will leave in its wake opportunities for property investors with the foresight to capitalize, literally and figuratively. Purchase prices on manifold smaller properties citywide will likely drop and the sorts of buildings that may not seem the soundest investment now could pay in spades later on—just like in the boom that recently passed.  read more »

Harlem condo sales plunged a staggering 76 percent annually in the third quarter of 2008, from 237 closed deals last year to just 57 for the three months ending Sept. 30. That’s according to an analysis of data, provided by research Web site PropertyShark, on Manhattan condo deals between roughly 110th and 155th streets.

Despite the anemic sales volume, accounting for the paltriest sales quarter since the start of 2007, Harlem condo prices increased 3 percent year over year in the third quarter, rising to a median sales price of $598,000.

The slowdown in buying activity is opening a window for an oversaturation in the Harlem condo market, as several upscale projects like 119th & Third and Graceline Court at 106 West 116th Street are scheduled to open in the coming months.  read more »

First, the entirely expected bad news for real estate developers and brokers: The Brooklyn condo market is slipping. According to the third-quarter Brooklyn market report from appraisal firm Miller Samuel, condo sales in the borough dropped from 979 in the third quarter of 2007 to 660 in the same period this year, and the median sales price fell from $529,490 in the third quarter of 2007 to $505,493 in the third quarter of 2008, a decline of 4.5 percent.

Developers can smile, however, knowing that prices aren’t down everywhere in the borough. The median sales price for condos in North Brooklyn, which includes the neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg, jumped from $544,801 in the third quarter of 2007 to $617,049 this year, according to the same report, sponsored by brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman.  read more »

European home buyers and investors used to be big in Manhattan. Buoyed by a strong euro and pound, embolde ned by a wide selection of new-development condos and verdant credit markets, the Europeans virtually invaded the borough to the point where their very presence became shorthand for the real estate market’s success.

“The Russians Are Coming” screamed a 2004 New York headline; “An Irish Taste for Real Estate in Manhattan” proclaimed a 2007 article in The New York Times.

Those days are over. On Oct. 10, the euro fell to $1.3579, its lowest level against the dollar in 14 months, according to the European Central Bank, and Europe’s economies have joined America’s in the muck.  read more »

“This is Manhattan—people have always done whatever it takes to live here,” said Daniel Baum, co-founder and chief operating officer of the Real Estate Group New York.

Sacrificing comfort and personal space is an old exercise for most people living in Manhattan, especially for creative-class types or aspiring artists. For the past few years, living with any degree of comfort in Manhattan required one of two things: good family connections or a well-paying, white-collar job. But what will happen when even successful young professionals in fields like I-banking and corporate law lack the job security to pay monthly rent on a basic apartment?

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Laurie Silverman, a Halstead Property executive, has noticed a peculiar shift in the demographics of her apartment-buying clientele: More and more young married couples, some pregnant or with young children, searching for larger, family-friendly living space.

There’s a shared sense of urgency amongst all her clients. “What we are seeing walking through the door these days,” Ms. Silverman said, “are people who really have to move.”

The rush of space-hungry families comes at an uncertain time. The chaotic economy has tossed the local real estate market into an unfamiliar limbo, as buyers and sellers stand on either side of the proverbial junior-high dance, hoping the gulf between them narrows.  read more »

Wall Street is dead. So says The Wall Street Journal, which declared on the front page of the Sept. 22 edition that the longtime epicenter of American capitalism “will cease to exist” as we know it. With the demise of the investment banks and the collapse of the financial services industry, so died the gilded dreams of so many aspiring Gordon Gekkos, who believed conquering Wall Street (or at least climbing to middle management) would be the shortest path to that New York version of the American Dream—a non-infested place in a not-awful building.

But with Mr. Gekko and his Learjet for now relegated to the sidelines, is it time for an updated map to that dream? A man, perhaps, like Mad Men’s Don Draper? It’s difficult to say what the New York economy will look like in two years, but it’s certainly permissible to speculate on which industries in the city can still fund the envy-producing lifestyles that provide the ambitious young worker bee enough liquid cash for a one-bedroom apartment or a no-frills condo in Brooklyn.  read more »

Economic troubles be damned, people are still snagging Brooklyn homes—just not where you’d expect. First-time buyers are eschewing familiar environs like Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights, and Prospect Heights for the borough’s far south and east corners.

In the second quarter of 2008, the median home sales price for Brooklyn was $525,000, according to a report from appraiser Miller Samuel; the bulk of the affordable sales below that middle price point have been in far-flung neighborhoods like Sheepshead Bay and East New York, according to data compiled by research firm StreetEasy.

Cheap property prices often entice young people, especially first-time home buyers who don’t have the capital or the fabulous credit to buy in the more established (and expensive) bobo Brooklyn neighborhoods.  read more »

Twenty-five thousand new jobs were created in the seven ZIP codes in and around downtown Brooklyn from 1997 through 2007. One of those ZIP codes, 11245, trumped all New York City ZIP codes in the rate of job creation during those 10 years, with a 253 percent increase, according to a report out last week from the Center for an Urban Future.

Still, what of it?

Downtown Brooklyn, for all the commercial growth (more than 2 million square feet of new office and retail space built in the past decade) and new jobs, remains a virtual suburban office park in the middle of America’s fourth-largest city.  read more »