Jonathan Miller

The headlines today (for example: "There Will Be Blood"), are enough to make New York real estate obsessives, who are mostly anxious types anyway, go crazy.

This morning, my colleague Tom Acitelli listed six ways today's Wall Street turmoil will affect real estate (and he listed apartment prices at the top. But Crain's just went a few steps further by chiming in with an article whose subhead says: "The latest crisis on Wall Street could deal a severe blow to apartment prices in Manhattan."

"The extent of this problem is mind-boggling," one hilariously oft-quoted appraiser says in the article. "The ’09 market, and possibly 2010, are going to be characterized by lower volume and some weakness in price levels.  read more »

The Miller Samuel-Douglas Elliman second-quarter Brooklyn market report is now online as a PDF.

Earlier summary here.

Jonathan Miller's Matrix blog alerted us to Gallup polling out last week on how Americans view the economy. It turns out that their annual income may have a lot to do with shaping that view (see above graph).

Basically, as Gallup notes, the more you make, the more optimistic you are right now. The less you make, the more pessimistic.

[I]t is not surprising that upper-income Americans are also generally less likely to rate the economy as "poor." For example, during the week of June 16-22, 40% of those making at least $90,000 a year gave this rating. "Poor" ratings were proportionally higher among those making $60,000 to less than $90,000 (42%), $24,000 to less than $60,000 (47%), and less than $24,000 a year (56%).  read more »

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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 »

Manhattan-based appraiser Jonathan Miller in the Wall Street Journal:

"In my opinion, 70 percent to 80 percent of appraisals that were done during the housing boom are probably not worth the paper they're written on."

Hat tip Matrix.

Appraiser Jonathan Miller emailed late on Friday to say that his firm Miller Samuel would not be merging with data and analytics firm Radar Logic after all. The two firms announced last fall that Radar Logic would acquire Miller Samuel, but the deal never closed. Mr. Miller's firm will remain by its original name and will continue to produce those quarterly reports that are to the Manhattan housing market what those brackets are to the NCAA Tournament.

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.

We've already grown fond of Radar Logic's relatively new monthly report that tracks home prices in markets throughout the nation, including New York City, and then compares the markets to one another.

For instance, the September report, out today (PDF), shows that the Cleveland metro area remains the cheapest housing market among the 25 polled, with an average price per foot of $92.26. Cleveland has been the cheapest in 10 of the last 11 months, in fact, ceding only one time (in June) to St.  read more »

Jonathan Miller's third-quarter Manhattan housing market report is available in full as a PDF. We referenced it here and here earlier this month.

We’ve taken a look at the new third-quarter housing numbers for Queens from Jonathan Miller and Prudential Douglas Elliman, and it looks like prices kept falling through the summer into the fall--this time, along with sales.

The average home sales price did increase from the quarter before (when it was $482,971) to reach $484,847. But it's barely noticeable against the larger drop from the third quarter of last year, when the average was $499,388.

The median price also dropped, but more steeply. The third quarter's $455,000 is 3 percent lower than the second’s $469,000 and 9 percent below the $500,000 in the third quarter of 2006.

So, while the higher-end properties in the land of the 7-train may be sustaining high prices, the average property is getting cheaper.

But, in a change from last quarter’s sales increase, the Queens market slowed down over the summer.  read more »

Appraiser Jonathan Miller called us late yesterday to tell us his third-quarter housing numbers for Long Island and for Queens will be out by Tuesday.

It'll be interesting to see what happens price-wise: Both the median and average sales prices of Queens homes declined in the second quarter from the first of this year.

Did the prices tumble further in the summer? Is it a buyer's market yet in Astoria, Flushing et al? Stay tuned...

You will never likely again have as a good a chance as you did the last few years to buy a home in Manhattan. The third quarter housing numbers, out yesterday, all but slammed the door shut to homeownership for perhaps a generation of both present and future New Yorkers.

The average apartment sale price increased 2.7 percent from the second quarter to $1,369,486, according to a report prepared by appraiser Jonathan Miller for brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman. And the average price per square foot hit a record high of $1,144.

Yet, plenty of people are still willing to pay. The average time a listing stayed on the market for the third quarter was 123 days, compared to 150 for the same time last year. And sales, already brisk for 2007, were up 65.6 percent over the third quarter of 2006.

These increases happened against a backdrop of relative chaos for the local housing market—in particular, the credit market problems that have made getting the sort of large mortgages necessary for Manhattan ownership much more difficult.  read more »

Take note: On his blog Matrix the other day, appraiser Jonathan Miller casually pointed out that his firm Miller Samuel “set a record for sales in [the] first half of August.”

We were curious about this "record," so we decided to give Mr. Miller a buzz to get some more information.  read more »

Few blog headlines recently can top Jonathan Miller's send-off to David Lereah, the departing chief economist of the National Association of Realtors. On his blog Matrix, Mr. Miller, a noted housing analyst in his own right, said good-bye thusly on Tuesday: 'David Lereah Resigns, Spin Takes a Smoke.'

Mr. Lereah has basically been criticized, if not lampooned, for his frequent breathless cheerleading of the national housing market. It was never too bad a time to buy. Quoth Mr. Miller:  read more »

In the first quarter of 2007, the Manhattan housing market notched a record number of apartment sale  read more »

• This week's New York magazine real-estate section answers pertinent questions like: How much are New York "street trees" [above] worth? How "ultraminimal" can a designer's house get? And what does Manhattan real-estate style look like in Fargo, ND? [NY]
• There's also a piece on real-estate cult figure Jonathan Miller, which somehow omitted interviews with his friends Woody Wheeler ("my group leader when I rode my bike across the US in '76") and Bart Simpson ("really! and he happens to be an appraiser"). [Matrix]
• You know a Brooklyn neighborhood is getting too hip when neighbors start complaining about churches. "It starts with this wood clacking, like two sticks beating together, and then it goes into an all out jump-fest, with mics," a brownstone renter complains. "It's drumbeats and a keyboard all day long. And then this one guy starts singing--pretty poorly, I might add."[Brooklyn Paper]
• Being a race car driver married to a model, being an actress who played Margaret Anderson in "Father Knows Best," or having the name Dean Witter III are all dandy ways to get expensive real estate. [WSJ]
• The only thing better than Manhattan real estate is a Manhattan real estate-related birthday. Thusly, our best wishes go out to Cushman & Wakefield's Cara Greenberg, who is still younger than all the Cushman bosses. - Max Abelson
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• No more gunfire across the bay for City Islanders.
[NY Times]
• Chumley's wall collapse sparks many happy memories.
[NY Times]
• Hey, apartment hunters, don't forget to ask about...
[NY Times]
• An author of lower Fifth finds 'the best place to be.'
[NY Times]
• Two West 56th Street townhouses closely linked.
[NY Times]
• More luxury housing overlooking Green-Wood Cemetery.
[NY Times]
• Mortgage products straining 'mathematical capacities.'
[NY Times]
• Co-op to condo conversion more trouble than its worth.
[NY Times]
• Security deposits--when can a new landlord demand one?
[NY Times]
• Can a co-op board member campaign for someone?
[NY Times]
• Housing slump hits state tax revenues nationwide.
[NY Times]
• Coffeeshop dusting off grit to please new East Village.
[NY Times]
• Hamptons papers to clash over real-estate advertising
[NY Times]
• Memories of the almost-2nd Avenue Subway.
[NY Times]
• City shutters Chumley's indefinitely, despite 'secure' building.
[NY Post]
• State rejects second Starrett City bid by Bistricer.
[NY Post]
• Battle looms in Albany over loft-tenants law.
[NY Post]
• Brokers push to land more foreign buyers.
[NY Post]
• Empire State Building owners sue parachuter for $12 M.
[Daily News]
• MTA to domolish buildings for 2nd Avenue Subway.
[Daily News] UPDATE:
• Face it: Jonathan Miller will appraise your apartment.
[New York]
• New York living as marketing tool nationwide.
[New York]

Did we miss any New York City real estate news this morning? Please send along tips and links.

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Pity upper-middle-class Manhattanites.  read more »

How far Manhattan's come. A new report says that the average sales price for a condo or a co-op in the borough has increased more than 200 percent in the last 10 years. The average price in 1997 was $430,927, and, in 2006, it was $1,295,445, according to the report from appraisal firm Miller Samuel and brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman.

The titanic upswings in housing prices shouldn't surprise any halfway sentient New Yorker. But some stats in the report did startle The Real Estate.

The median sales price for a Manhattan co-op apparently jumped 244.4 percent from 1997 through 2006, traveling from what now seems a very affordable $196,000 to the decidedly less so $675,000. The median price for Manhattan studio co-ops was under $100,000; now, it's nearly three times that.

The prices-per-square-foot for Manhattan apartments in the late 1990's seemed especially quaint. An Upper East Side co-op sold for an average of $315 a foot 10 years ago, and for $988 a foot now. Along Central Park West a decade back, co-ops went for an average of $524 a foot; now, $1,548. Chelsea condos in 1997 sold for an average of $319 a foot--just about one-third of what condos there sell for now. In Harlem and East Harlem, the price per foot increased 340 percent, from $145 a foot to $639.

And, despite such price increases, the number of Manhattan home sales stayed steady year to year over the last decade, going from a valley of 7,316 in 1997 to a peak of 9,522 in 1999.

Miller Samuel CEO Jonathan Miller assured The Real Estate on Monday that a link to the full report would be up on his firm's Web site by early Tuesday.

UPDATE: The link is up (PDF). - Tom Acitelli

• Made-up Manhattan Neighborhood of the Week: First came LoHo, now here's South Village Historic District. But what will the abbreviation be? The New York Observer proudly proposes the SoVil--or maybe SoVilHisDis. Or SoHis? [The Villager, via Real Deal]
• Ominous Declaration of the Month: "You either work for or against the Real Estate Industrial Complex." - Jonathan Miller. [The Matrix]
• Floorplan Rendering of the Decade: The $16 million triplex penthouse at the American Thread Building. The boring two dimensions of an average floorplan have been abandoned here for an all-color, tech-savvy, pop-art, name-dropping Internet experience. Ogling at triplex penthouses will never be the same. [Curbed]
• Bold 2007 Prediction of the Week: CNN names Mexico and Turkey and France among "up-and-coming destinations." [CNN/Money]
- Max Abelson
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Jonathan Miller, the best-informed man in the residential real estate biz, releases his 3rd Quarter report today. (Lots of other folks do too, obviously).

The big message is that there's no need for panic. Residential prices are going down, Mr. Miller says, but they're still higher than they were this time last year. So at least the bubble won't have a violent burst, right?

And brokers beware: it took an average of 150 days to sell an apartment this quarter, which is two and a half weeks longer than the number for this time last year. Plus, discounts are on the rise. Salvation!

More after the jump.  read more »

- Max Abelson

After double digit increases following the 2nd Quarter of 2005, there were headlines forecasting an immediate real estate collapse. And while that hasn't happened, the relatively small increases or decreases --depending on which market report you're looking at--show a more stable, if not cooling, market.

Today, three major brokerages released their market reports. Similar to last quarter, the results differ here and there. In both the Corcoran Group and Brown Harris Stevens reports, the average sales price for all Manhattan apartments (both condos and co-ops) dropped 5 percent. However, the Prudential Douglas Elliman report--prepared by Miller Samuel--showed an increase of 6.6 percent. And in that report, the average apartment has hit a new record price: $1.386 million.  read more »

But one significant area of concern could be the increased inventory of condos.

It's time for the quarterly reports again! And as always, the brokerages are breathing largely the same rarefied air inside Manhattan's still-robust real-estate bubble.

The headline is that the average price for a Manhattan apartment topped $1,000 a square foot to reach a new record, according to reports issued today by all four major Manhattan brokerages: Douglas Elliman, The Corcoran Group, Brown Harris Stevens, and Halstead.

Inventory is also expanding across the market--a worrying indicator as increased supply puts strains on the stratospheric climb of prices in the Manhattan real-estate market.

David Lombino of The New York Sun talked to real-estate maven Jonathan Miller, author of Douglas Elliman's report:

"With the inventory coming on, we are reaching a saturation point," an appraiser who is an author of one of the reports, Jonathan Miller, said. "It's significantly different from a year or two ago, when these apartments would sell the second they got built."

Mr. Miller's analysis shows a nearly 16% spike in inventory between the first quarter of 2006 and the last quarter of 2005, and a nearly 60% spike in the number of apartments on the market since the first quarter of 2005,when a hot market led to a record low inventory. Mr. Miller said that if the demand for luxury housing drops due to a spike in mortgage rates or another scenario, it could lead to a glut.

(Incidentally, Miller has rounded up all of the morning's coverage, so I don't have to! Find it here.)  read more »

• The BBC has gone mad scientist. They're "hoping to harness the power of thousands of PCs around the world"--including yours--to predict the climate. (BBC)
• The best Jamaican goat roti in town. (The New York Times)
• Now that housing prices in Manhattan are unaffordable, let's build a hotel in Tribeca to bring in more rich people. (New York Post)
• Fed chairman Bernanke thinks that mortgage rates will stay low enough to keep the housing market stable, according to Jonathan Miller. (Matrix)
• Fed chairman Bernanke says that more rate increases are ahead, which will mean higher mortgage rates, according to Jonathan Miller. (Matrix)
• The Morgans Hotel Group, founded by Ian Schrager, had its IPO this week. Although he sold most of the company last decade, Schrager left the week $9 million richer and with a $46 million stake in Morgans. (Curbed)
• If graffiti artists use LED lights instead of spray paint, will their work still need to be "cleaned up" per the city's new law? (Gothamist)
• The Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum announced the participating designers and firms in their "National Design Triennial: Design Life Now." (CHNDM)
• The director of the Design Museum, Alice Rawsthorn, "abruptly resigned" because of tensions over her taste for "decorative tendency" versus utility. The fight isn't over. (Telegraph)
• An interactive structure in the Netherlands changes color based on the feelings of people who vote online or through questionaire for "happy," "hate," or "love." What color would the tower be in New York? (arcspace)
• The American Institute of Architects (AIA) Center for Communities by Design has selected eight communities to receive technical assistance under the Sustainable Design Assessment Team (SDAT) program in 2006, including Syracuse, N.Y. (AIA)
• Royal Philips Electronics has built a full-scale city environment so that designers, architects and city officials can see how different light can improve the quality of urban life. (Gizmag)
• Courtney Love of Hole has finally found a buyer for her Crosby Street apartment. (Page Six)

- Riva Froymovich

We're a little late on this today, but then we've known about it for a while:

The National Association of Realtors, a national lobby of real-estate brokers, is a bad place to get information about the real estate market.

So at least reports The Walk-Through, the Times' brand-new baby blog about the real-estate market, in a pretty nice little smack-down.

And as always, Jonathan Miller has the definitive take:

Over the years we have relied on this near monopoly of information to gain insight as to the direction of the real estate market. Of course we recognize that this is a trade group and its purpose is to look out for its membership. However, its not the statistics that are creating the gap, its the hard sell that goes along with it.

Our question is pettier: How will Damon Darlin's analysis go over at the Times real-estate desk? Because they've been relying on the NAR a lot lately:

• "After married couples, single women now make up the largest segment of home buyers -- 21 percent in 2005, up from 18 percent the year before, in contrast to single men, who make up 9 percent of home buyers, according to a survey published this month by the National Association of Realtors." (The New York Times, "Our Equity, Ourselves," Jan. 26, 2006)
• "Sales of existing homes fell or stayed flat in all four regions of the country, while the total inventory of homes for sale dipped slightly, the National Association of Realtors reported." (The New York Times, "Home Sales Fell Again In December," Jan. 26, 2006)
• "Part of the reason more people divide their time between homes is that more people own second homes. According to the National Association of Realtors, buyers purchased 2.82 million second homes in 2004, up 16 percent from a year earlier."(The New York Times, "Double Nesters," Jan. 19, 2006)

Maybe now the word "Realtor" can finally be scrapped, since it's the N.A.R.-enforced term of art (which is why we try, insofar as we can control anything, to stick with the words "broker" or "agent"--not that you won't catch us out on that.)

- Tom McGeveran

That's Jonathan Miller, New York's resident real-estate expert, not the Gifford of days past.

Michael Bloomberg issued a doomsday statement on the New York real-estate market to Reuters this weekend:

"The real estate market is slowing down dramatically and we're going to have a problem down the road," Bloomberg said.

But the statement, which responds to one of Jonathan Miller's regular reports, prepared for Douglas Elliman, doesn't support Bloomberg's gloom, Miller argues on his Web log, Matrix:

Why, then, make a pronouncement that could be a self-fulfilling prophecy? Miller:  read more »

'From a political perspective, the city is running a large surplus ($3B) coming in part from the taxes paid by the housing sector and one could speculate he is positioning himself in the next fiscal year to lower the expectations of those would like to spend it.'

Hmm ... - Tom McGeveran

That's the conclusion Newsday draws from Tuesday's market reports.

"It's not a buyers' market, but we're close to equilibrium," the paper quotes real-estate maven Jonathan Miller saying.

This feels a tad premature. A buyer's market is just: more people want to sell than buy. While negotiability (let's call that a function of what people actually pay versus how much the seller is asking, and how long people take to decide to pay it) can be a sign that sellers are outnumbering buyers, it's just a sign.

Inventory is the thing to watch. That's the factor that grew out of control the last time the real-estate market crashed in Manhattan. (By they way, during that "crash," I didn't exactly score a cheap co-op on the Upper East Side. Did you?)  read more »

It's true that new housing seems to be going up everywhere. The information we need is: how much new housing is coming online when, and what is the projected demand for it at the time it's scheduled to go online?

- Tom McGeveran

- That syrup smell? Blame New Jersey. New York Times - Real estate slowdown? The number of mortgage applications filed last week fell to the lowest level since May 2002. The Real Deal - Jonathan Miller gets meta: Big Media’s use of “bubble speak” is declining. Matrix - Meanwhile Janis Mara at Inman News makes fun of everyone. - Prices went up in Manhattan. But volume went down. WSJ Online - Ian Schrager and Aby Rosen bought One Madison Avenue; it's fated for condos. The Real Deal - More on Castle Village residents getting slapped with major bills stemming from the West Side Highway collapse in the Spring. Curbed - Claim: Economic resurgence for lower Manhattan. New York Sun - New details of the World Trade Center Memorial design. Daily News - The Federal government will soon be New Orleans' largest land-owner. New York Times - Selling reporters on the condos at the Plaza. New York Times - Second Avenue Deli closes--maybe for good. New York Times - Rejected from one downtown tourist trap, the Drawing Center considers another: South Street Seaport. New York Times - If you can't clean it properly, sell ads on it! David Dunlap on those ad-wraps on subway-station columns. New York Times - Art Deco beauty at 29 W. 57th Street (in the shadow of Sheldon Solow's 9 West) could fetch $50 million. New York Post  read more »

Gray Lady real-estate blogging arriviste Damon Darlin over at The Walk-Through is unconvinced by doomsday forecasts for the real-estate market or speculation the bubble--if there is one--is about to burst.

We don't pretend to understand things like flipping condos in Marin County or those weird speculation deals in Oklahoma that Erik Estrada advertises during daytime television.

New York is more our bag--and we still don't see a bubble here anymore than we did back in June when Jonathan Miller told us:

"The situation in New York is different in the sense that we don't have the rampant speculation, the property-flipping. It pales in comparison to what is going on nationally."

In the heavily investor-driven South Florida market, which has been a major focus of recent coverage, Mr. Miller said, roughly 60 to 70 percent of sales are speculative purchases.

Still, quarterly reports from the Manhattan brokerages, which come out tomorrow, are likely to offer ammunition to both sides of the bubble debate.

Getting on board early, the Times' Willie Neuman had a few predictions on Friday: An increase in the fourth quarter of 2005 in the average Manhattan apartment price of five percent. Increases have recently been as high as 30 percent, so that's not great.

He notes, as we so often do, that the average apartment price is not the best index; we'll add that often the data is bad, coming as it so often does from people with a dog in the race. But Neuman says that the averages can probably be accounted for because the upper end of the market, dominated by bigger apartments, cooled a little while studio and one-bedroom sales picked up, pulling the average price down without saying much about the market overall.  read more »

We'll look at them closely and Michael will no doubt have our take on the market in this week's Manhattan Transfers column.

- Tom McGeveran

The third quarter drop played out in the press with ominous, bubble-bursting headlines. But high-end brokers always find a way to look on the bright side, and are now hotly anticipating positive news from Wall Street.

A few weeks ago, Jonathan Miller discussed the possibility of record-breaking bonuses on Wall Street. And today in The New York Sun, David Lombino finds brokers anxiously waiting for such favorable news (sub req).

“Their bonuses are our bonuses," a broker for the Corcoran Group, Wilbur Gonzalez, said.

Now, if only Mr. Gonzalez can find some young trader with a bonus-to-burn to grab Courtney Love’s Soho loft off his hands.  read more »

-Michael Calderone

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