Housing

It begins.

There have been since Sept. 18 over 200 price cuts on properties listed at less than $10 million on the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side, reports the Wall Street Journal's Sara Lin. That's a 17 percent jump from the week before.

Plus, there's this:

Deanna Kory, a broker with New York-based Corcoran Group who's handling nearly two-dozen properties priced between $2 million and $10 million, says her showings are down by about 40% in the last two weeks compared to the same time last year. A slew of new buildings set to open in the next year will only increase supply.

And, yes, it's largely due to the financial crisis.  

Mocking Los Angeles is a time-honored pastime for New Yorkers. We cling to the L.A. that Woody Allen imagined in Annie Hall: a culturally barren land of liposuction and libidos, a crass, one-industry town full of phonies. Sure, the weather is better on the West Coast, we tell ourselves as we trudge the city’s sidewalks for the ridiculous procession of slushy weeks from Thanksgiving to St. Patrick’s Day. But look at the trade-offs they make in sunny California: traffic, pollution, sub-par museums, second-rate theaters, no seasons.

Lately, the younger generation of Manhattanites seems to be rejecting the L.A. stereotypes perpetuated by their parents. Some plan to settle back in New York after their spells on the West Coast, but others have come to call L.A. home.  read more »

Designer Vera Wang's 14-room apartment at 778 Park Avenue has gone to contract, according to the Wall Street Journal today. Ms. Wang was asking $35 million for the five-bedroom spread in the ultra-tony co-op. No word from listing brokers Deborah Grubman and Carol Cohen of the Corcoran Group on whether Ms. Wang got that price.

The much-anticipated showdown between Landmark West and Congregation Shearith Israel has been postponed.

As we reported last week, the Upper West Side synagogue Congregation Shearith Israel wants to build five stories of luxury condos on top of a new community house at 8 West 70th Street. Landmark West, an Upper West Side community group, has led the opposition to the development because it feels Shearith Israel is a non-profit organization trying to make a buck.  read more »

Manhattan is no longer big enough for NYU.

The Greenwich Village-based university recently purchased 58 units at the soon-to-open Riverwalk Landing condominium on Roosevelt Island as part of a new faculty housing program. Under the Riverwalk Landing Purchase Program, the school will resell the units to N.Y.U. faculty at below-market value. And it only gets better for the professors. Notonly will the condos be offered at a discount, but the university will give secondary financing for up to 30 percent of a unit's purchase price.
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The battle between Congregation Shearith Israel and Landmark West is set to rage once again.

For those who aren't up to date with Upper West Side land-use gossip, here's the skinny:

Upper West Side synagogue Congregation Shearith Israel wants to build a new community house at 8 West 70th Street, and then build five stories of luxury condos on top. Shearith Israel claims that the new building is necessary in order to address "the physical obsolescence and the ill-configured floorplans" of the current structure. Landmark West, an Upper West Side community group, has led the opposition to the development largely because they feel Shearith Israel could easily rebuild the community house without the condominium floors, and thus not violate any zoning laws.  read more »

A moment of silence for the apartment hunters, please. By the end of the year, vacancy rates for apartments in Manhattan will dip below 2 percent, according to a new report from Marcus & Millichap, an investment-sales firm that doesn’t broker rentals in the city. This would be the lowest vacancy rate since 2000’s 1.2 percent.  read more »

This March, a juicy headline in The New York Post called big-haired Jersey pop heartthrob Jon Bon Jovi a “$26 Million Man.” That was the price he paid, according to the newspaper, for the New Museum penthouse duplex on Mercer Street, a 7,400-square-foot spread that had been listed for $26.5 million.

But according to deeds filed in city records, which uses the rocker’s real name John Bongiovi, his purchase price was really $24,000,000. Pocket change!  read more »

In one of the biggest real estate deals ever, Tishman Speyer and Lehman Brothers have bought Archstone-Smith, the real estate investment trust that owns more than 86,000 apartments nationwide. The $22.2 billion acquisition includes at least 10 buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn. It's the largest such public-to-private acquisition ever among apartment REITs.

For Tishman Speyer, the acquisition may be a welcome change. The company bought Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in 2006 for more than $5 billion, but most of the apartments in those complexes are protected from market-rate rents by government controls. Not so with the Archstone-Smith apartments. One-bedrooms in the Archstone 39th start now at $4,475 a month; in the Archstone 101 West End, a studio can run toward $2,900 a month.

More on this record deal in tomorrow's print edition of The Observer.  read more »

A Queens College study commissioned by The New York Times found that one in three New York City households owned their homes in 2005. This conclusion gels with an earlier study by New York University's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, which also found a one-third homeownership rate at mid-decade.

Still, despite the increases in city homeowners (the Queens College study says the number of owner-occupied homes has passed 1 million for the first time), New York City lags the nation overall. The homeownership rate nationally was nearly 70 percent in 2005, according to the N.Y.U. study; and New York ranked well below other major cities in homeownership rates, including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

You may want to sit down for this one: Michael Shvo, titan of Manhattan luxury marketing, wants you to pick his firm's new tagline.

Curbed reports that Mr. Shvo will give $10,000 to the lucky Svengali who picks the successor for Shvo's current "Exclusive Sales & Marketing" tagline. The Observer confirmed with Curbed on Friday that this was, indeed, a real competition and not a joke. Mr. Shvo, as The Observer noted earlier this month, is renowned for over-the-top marketing and for a reputation that inspires both awe and loathing in his competitors and compatriots.  read more »

The deadline for submissions is June 1. So, Shvo Off and Do It! Or something to that effect...

A Wall Street Journal piece this morning asks the increasingly relevant question: Is my mortgage broker really working for me?

New Yorkers, especially, should be asking that. State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo earlier this month subpoenaed information from Manhattan appraiser Mitchell Maxwell & Jackson and from mortgage broker Manhattan Mortgage Company, one of the city's top originators of mortgages. Mr. Cuomo's office then, shortly after these initial subpoenaes, extended its dragnet to include the real-estate appraisal unit of First American Corp., another appraiser that does work in the city.

The information sought? Whether or not mortgage brokers have been pressuring appraisers to inflate or otherwise change property values.

In a city where such values have jumped this decade, the pressure is understandably on for every side of a home sale--buyer, seller, broker, mortgage broker, bank. Each side has vested financial interests in a closed deal, and buyers who trust their mortgage brokers to work for them (rather than realizing up front that the mortgage broker works for him or herself) engage in a fickle lunacy.

"The mortgage broker does not represent the borrower," one mortgage broker in Colorado told the Journal. "We sell access to money."

Borrower, beware, indeed.  read more »

There are several perks to being the son of a famous Irish folk singer. For example: Donal Clancy, the son of Clancy Brothers’ tenor Liam, has bought a $3.02 million duplex high up at 870 United Nations Plaza.

According to deeds filed this afternoon in city records, the seller is photographer and sociologist Flavia Robinson.  read more »

As they did in Manhattan, home sales in Westchester County jumped in the first three months of 2007. Sales were up more than 18 percent from the fourth quarter of 2006 through the first of this year, according to the Westchester-Putnam Multiple Listing Service. In the first quarter, in fact, Westchester recorded 10,250 home sales—more than what Manhattan typically sees in an entire year.  read more »

Like in Manhattan, home sales in Westchester County jumped in the first three months of 2007. Sales were up more than 18 percent from the fourth quarter of 2006 through the first of this year, according to the Westchester-Putnam Multiple Listing Service. In the first quarter, in fact, Westchester recorded 10,250 home sales—more than what Manhattan typically sees in an entire year.  read more »

“This is not a building opening—it’s just a party,” said luxury-property propagandist Michael Shvo.

He was standing along a black carpet runway with black velvet ropes and a big white backdrop bearing logos for the new Gramercy, a 21-story high-end apartment tower on East 23rd Street outfitted by eccentric French designer Philippe Starck.  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 »