Prudential Douglas Elliman

By the time 2008 ends, there will be two kinds of high-end brokers left in New York. Most will outwardly panic, and the sturdier will force their dread to simmer beneath a slightly clenched smile that says, “Everything is quite fine, thank you.” After all, a tiny (and dwindling) group of only wealthy people are willing to make real estate deals, at least the kind of big real estate deal that New York prides itself on.

In the past few weeks, The Observer has written about the children of a Texas natural-gas billionaire, a Gulf & Western co-founder, a Berkshire Hathaway billionaire and a Turkish billionaire all buying up Manhattan real estate.  read more »

If Dolly Lenz did not exist we would have to create her. The woman is a real estate mega-broker of mythological proportions: She has said that she has done $7 billion in sales, has personally owned 70 to 80 properties, and currently keeps 12 BlackBerrys; her name is in the news weekly, especially in the Post’s real estate column; her old falling-out with ex-protégé Michael Shvo is still realty’s juiciest feud; Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, a client, nicknamed her “Jaws.”

So imagine the gasps echoing around upscale Manhattan this month when the annual Real Estate Top 200, an objective ranking (by sales volume and what’s called transaction sides) sponsored by the Wall Street Journal, Real Trends and Lore Magazine, didn’t have Ms.  read more »

Last week, we told you about 50 new retail locations (or expansions) opening up all over the city, as was detailed in a brochure from Prudential Douglas Elliman. We discovered that companies like Burberry, Rock & Republic, West Elm, and Vera Wang are fearlessly trudging ahead with new outposts despite current economic conditions.

Following this somewhat encouraging news, in the last week we've heard about small boutiques struggling to stay alive, and Macy's and Saks Fifth Avenue reporting $44 million and $42.8 million losses respectively in the third quarter. But this didn't seem to faze Elliman chairman Faith Hope Consolo and executive vice president Joseph Aquino of the firm's Retail Leasing and Sales division, as they are now marketing five new retail spaces to the few companies that currently have the means to expand.  read more »

Welcome to the buyer's market: Supply is up, demand is down, and prices are teetering. Brokers say buy now – after all, there are deals to be had! But what if you waited?

Here’s four areas (and one borough) where buyers would be fools to rush in now.

1. MANHATTAN
In Manhattan, prices are falling. But several gauges indicate that, in the months ahead, they'll fall even further.

For one, new development – which accounted for 30 percent of sales in the borough last quarter – continues to skew prices, according to the third-quarter market report from Miller Samuel and Prudential Douglas Elliman.  read more »

As the Hamptons housing market tumbled mightily in the third quarter, the North Fork's saw a mild price bounce. The North Fork median sales price was $575,000 in the third quarter, up 10 percent from last year, according to the new Miller Samuel-Douglas Elliman report.

The North Fork, home to a cluster of well-respected wineries and other tourist attractions, lacks the sandy dunes and social cachet of its southern neighbor; but the home price increase, at a time when the Hamptons' declined, could reflect a maturation of the North Fork as a second-home destination. Make no mistake, however: Despite a nearly 20 percent annual drop in the Hamptons' median sales price, to $830,000, it still dwarfed the North Fork's by $255,000.

It’s not all good news in the North Fork, however, though in this market that’s not really terribly startling. (The Miller Samuel numbers reflect deals closed in the three months ending Sept. 30, and therefore don't necessarily reflect the financial crisis.)  read more »

All is not well at the summer playground for America’s rich and famous, as home prices and sales in eastern Long Island tumbled to two-year lows in the third quarter, according to a new Hamptons/North Fork market report from real estate appraisal shop Miller Samuel and brokerage giant Prudential Douglas Elliman.

The quarterly median sales price in the tony vacation enclaves dropped to $729,000, which is the lowest since the fourth quarter of 2006 and 17.3 percent below last year’s median price of $882,000. Third-quarter sales fell from 427 last year to 355 this year, a 16.9 percent plunge, which brought East End market activity to its slowest quarterly pace since Miller Samuel began tracking the area in the second quarter of 2006.  read more »

Jonathan Miller has posted the rather grim Douglas Elliman-Miller Samuel third-quarter housing report--sales down, prices down, condo sales really down. PDF here.

The Miller Samuel-Prudential Douglas Elliman third-quarter Manhattan housing report's now online (PDF).

To read about the sagging Manhattan condo market click here; to read about the troubled luxury market click here.

By year’s end, some of commercial real estate’s freshest young brokers will give up on the somnolent field and start searching for a new line of work, according to the industry’s older hands.

“This is a cliché, but this is the time when the men are separated from the boys,” said Cory Zelnik, of Zelnik and Company.

It’s apparently an apt cliché: “This market, I hate to say it, separates the men from the boys, the strong from the weak,” said Faith Hope Consolo, chairwoman of the retail leasing and sales division at Prudential Douglas Elliman. The “boys” in this case are the newcomers.  read more »

Like in Manhattan (and Brooklyn and Queens), home sales in the Hamptons plunged annually in the second quarter of 2008. At the same time, the average home sales price dropped annually and quarterly as well to $1,730,414, according to a new report from appraisal firm Miller Samuel and brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman. The report covers closed deals for the quarter ending June 30.

The 26.2 percent sales drop from the second quarter of 2007 mirrors a Manhattan year-over-year drop of 21.8 percent, suggesting the oft-cited symbiosis between the two housing markets. Quarterly Hampton sales, similar to Manhattan's, were up 12.8 percent to 352--that's still well below the 477 recorded in the second quarter last year.  read more »

Home sales in Queens plunged annually from the spring of 2007, according to a new report, joining Brooklyn and Manhattan in steep year-over-year sales slides.

Queens home sales were down 23.7 percent from the second quarter of 2007 through the second quarter of 2008, to 2,363, according to the report out this week from appraisal firm Miller Samuel and brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman. The second quarter sales amount--nearly 3,100--represents, apparently, a quarterly peak since 2004.  read more »

A report earlier this month showed Brooklyn home sales plunging 43.6 percent annually. And, in Manhattan, sales dropped 21.8 percent year over year. The reports tracked deals closed in the quarter ending June 30 (the Manhattan and Brooklyn ones are available

Here's a breakdown by Brooklyn region of home sales in the second and first quarters of 2008, and in the second quarter of 2007.

Sales dropped just about everywhere--and by double-digit percentages boroughwide--according to the new statistics from appraisal firm Miller Samuel and brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman.  read more »

The second-quarter Manhattan housing market reports will be out by Wednesday morning of next week. Last time they hit, for the first quarter, the reports caused quite the kerfuffle, including internal company e-mails and a New York Times article trying to sort the whole thing out.

Basically, it went like this: Prudential Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel's report showed a 34 percent annual drop in Manhattan home sales. Brown Harris Stevens and Halstead Property's showed a 5 percent gain. And the Corcoran Group's showed a mere 1 percent drop.

All good and well--different measures by different firms, different numbers.  read more »

But! Elliman superbroker Dolly Lenz sent out an

Sorry, outer-borough bargain-hunters; the median sales price in Queens actually increased slightly to $498,500 in the first quarter of 2008, compared to $492,900 in the same period last year, according to Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Q1 2008 Long Island/Queens Market Report.

Credit all the new high-end developments coming on-line, not increasing demand, for the price hike.  read more »

This morning, no surprises, omnipotent Dolly Lenz was named Prudential Douglas Elliman’s number-one broker. And she doesn’t quite care.

“I only got there for the last few minutes. I was in a meeting, literally, with a major banking group, and should not have gone,” she told me, two hours after the ceremony. “They texted me when it was time to get in the car and get there”--she has four Blackberries. “I literally got in the car and went down there and left. I heard no speeches, heard no awards.”  read more »

The only thing more exciting than today’s news about the upcoming sale of Bob Guccione’s townhouse (or about Sharon Baum's Vespa), is Prudential Douglas Elliman’s annual awards ceremony, taking place right this moment, until noon, at Cipriani 42nd Street.

It’s the stuff real estate dreams are made of! Annual broker awards, especially at a monolith like Elliman, are about money, status, competitiveness, salesmanship, hierarchy, and of course, self-celebration.

Yet Elliman, it turns out, does not appreciate it when real estate reporters try to attend. After a series of e-mails and phone calls last night with Elliman’s public relations team, I was turned away at the softly red-lit entrance to the 65-foot-high, 87-year-old ballroom today at 9:12 a.m.—first by one well-dressed woman, then a second nice woman and suited man came over too.  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.

Queens home sales dropped 27.2 percent from the fourth quarter of 2006 to the fourth quarter of 2007, according to a new report from brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman and research firm Radar Logic. Sales also dropped from the third quarter 28 percent, suggesting that the largely suburban borough is mimicing much of the nation rather than its fellow boroughs to the west and south, Manhattan and Brooklyn.  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 »

Linda Stein, the original celebrity real-estate broker, was found by her daughters bludgeoned to death Tuesday night in her Fifth Avenue apartment.

Ms. Stein, who sat down for an interview with The Observer in May, became a broker after her breakup with Seymour Stein of Sire Records. Before that, she had been a fixture on the downtown music scene, helping to form the careers of New York artists like The Ramones and Madonna. She was also the lifelong friend of Elton John, who issued the following statement on hearing of her death: “I’m absolutely shocked and upset. She’s been a friend for over 37 years and will be greatly missed. She did so much for breast cancer and was a huge supporter of my AIDS foundation.”

Here's The New York Times:

Ms. Stein’s body was found face down in the living room in a pool of blood, the police said. She was wearing a sweatshirt with a hood, which was pulled over her head. Investigators at first believed the bleeding could have resulted from a fall, but when the hood was pulled back, a severe skull injury was exposed. Yesterday, the medical examiner’s office ruled the death a homicide.

Ms. Stein had many tumultuous relationships in her life, but investigators have not focused on any particular people, and did not comment on possible motives, a law enforcement official said. Investigators said they thought Ms. Stein was seen alive earlier on Tuesday, and they were trying to determine who was with her later that day.

UPDATE: The Observer's May interview with Stein can be found here.

UPDATE: An update on the police investigation can be found here.

To paraphrase Beresford resident Jerry Seinfeld: What's the deal with Dolly Lenz?

In August, the Broker of Brokers told The New York Sun that the higher-end real estate market in New York had stumbled sharply:

"I've been doing this 20 years — I've never seen anything change this fast."

This morning, two months later, the New York Post has Ms. Lenz saying:

"I'd say traffic has more than doubled than this time last year, which is beyond comprehension," says Prudential Douglas Elliman vice chairman Dolly Lenz.

 read more »

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 »

Prudential Douglas Elliman will hold a grand opening for its first Park Slope office tomorrow evening. This office, located at 154 Seventh Avenue between Carroll Street and Garfield Place, comes on the heels of archrival the Corcoran Group announcing a Williamsburg location.

And the invasion of the boroughs by Manhattan brokers continues unabated...

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 »

The Real Estate Board of New York sent out a release this afternoon saying it would demonstrate on Thursday for the media its new Web portal for city home buyers and renters, called ResidentialNYC.com. The portal will become available to the public on Friday. But the release included nothing about the participation of the Corcoran Group and Prudential Douglas Elliman, the two largest residential brokerages in the New York City metro region.

The New York Times reported in April that neither brokerage would participate in the portal, which has been a long time coming to the often fractiously terrotorial industry. (Citi Habitats, the city's largest rental agency, also would not be participating, according to the Times, as it falls under the corporate umbrella of Corcoran.) ResidentialNYC.com will collect exclusive listings of homes for sale and rent from REBNY-member brokerages. The media demonstration will be led by Steven Spinola, REBNY's president.

We have a call out to REBNY about the status of Corcoran and Elliman's participation, and are checking with the brokerages.