Freshening up the inventory

As market slows down, brokers pull and re-list apartments


As the market slows, an increasing number of brokers have pulled apartments off the market, with the intention of giving them a short hiatus from the lackluster real estate environment and then re-listing them.

The goal? To bring new attention to properties that have lingered for weeks or months without any movement. In some cases the sellers have dropped their prices before putting them back on the market, but in other cases the move has merely been designed as a breather to turn the stale units into "new listings" again when they re-enter the fray.

"It really only works well when it's the beginning of one season and the end of another," said Deanna Kory, a senior vice president at Corcoran. "You don't want to do anything that would come off as being a trick."

In August, when the market was even slower than normal, Kory pulled about a half-dozen listings. She then re-listed them last month. The properties ranged in price from about $1 million to $3 million, she said. She added that she knows of other brokers who did the same in August and then re-listed them after Labor Day, when they were more likely to get a fresh look. Kory said it is still too early to determine how potential buyers will respond to the re-listings, but she is hopeful.

Putting a unit back in the system after it's been off the market for more than 90 days restarts the clock, so that "time on market" is calculated from the beginning of the new go-round. The freshness makes it more attractive to potential buyers: Most brokerages have separate links on their Web sites leading to the newest listings, making sure that the most recently added properties get extra attention.

In many cases, newly listed properties also generate automatic e-mails to prospective buyers who have signed up to receive information about new sales from a brokerage's Web site.
But even if the hiatus is shorter than 90 days, some brokers have found that a break from the market can still be helpful.

Tracie Hamersley, senior vice president at Citi Habitats, said she took one property off the market for the summer and re-listed it last month. The sellers of the four-bedroom, three-bathroom co-op at 30 Beekman Place had dropped the price once, by nearly $100,000, and were asking $1.799 million.

Earlier this summer, the sellers almost sold the apartment to a buyer who was ready to pay in cash. But the deal fell through at the last minute when the co-op board didn't approve the prospective owner. After that, it felt like a natural time to pull the listing and wait for a new season to begin before restarting the marketing process.

Hamersley noted that she had recently convinced the sellers to drop the price to $1.7 million and said she has seen an increase in inquiries since re-listing the property.

"Any way that we can try to reintroduce it to the market" helps give the property a fresh face, she said. At a recent event held for brokers and buyers, she noted, "Empirically people were reacting to it in the way they would a new listing."

Hamersley took another apartment off the market this summer — a 600-square-foot convertible alcove studio at 201 East 21st Street. But that property has yet to return to the market, since there have been a glut of similar apartments for sale in the same building.

Several of those other studios have, however, recently sold, and Hamersley and the sellers are now thinking about re-listing it.

Every year, the volume of deals tends to fall off in the summer, said Jeff Krantz, vice president of sales and marketing at City Connections Realty.

"If you look back, generally you see listings taken off in summer and put on in fall," he said. This year, he noted, "I wouldn't be surprised if it was happening a bit more."

While Krantz didn't de-list any properties this summer, he said he did recommend that some sellers wait until several weeks after Labor Day to advertise their apartments.

According to a Prudential Douglas Elliman market report put together by Miller Samuel, there were 21.8 percent fewer Manhattan sales in the second quarter of this year than there were during the same time last year.

Sales of Brooklyn properties dropped a more severe 44 percent during that time period, according to Miller Samuel.

The soft sales environment has required some creativity when it comes to making properties stand out to buyers, especially as they remain longer on the market.

Hamersley said she has tried various sales tactics aside from taking listings down and then bringing them back to market with new prices. She has, for example, distributed advertisements to renters rather than just to property owners. And she has put one property up for rent as well as for sale.

The approach appears to be helping. She said she's seen an increase in potential buyer interest since the beginning of last month, despite the overall market turbulence.