Home price declines letting up in NYC | The Real Deal | New York Real Estate News
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Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
UES residents ousted due to Second Avenue Subway construction
Residents at 1873 Second Avenue received a temporary relocation notice informing them they will have to be out of their apartments for 30 to 60 days due to construction at the adjacent building of an air vent for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Second Avenue subway project at 1875 Second Avenue.
The letter, dated March 19, does not indicate when the residents in the 12-unit Bradford N. Swett Management-managed building between 96th and 97th streets will have to clear out of their apartments, but a spokesperson for the MTA said it hoped construction would begin some time next month (see full letter below).
"This is devastating. I don't want to move. If I move it would have to be for good and I can't afford that. I have been in this apartment for 10 years and have always paid my rent and I just can't believe something like this could happen. I heard about things like this happening in Brooklyn, but never thought it could happen to me. I know your readers are influential and I hope some of them could read this and help us," a tenant in the building, who asked for anonymity, said.
The MTA assures in the letter that it will pay for the cost of relocation, temporary housing and the restoration of their apartments.
The MTA says it will be holding a meeting for tenants to meet with O.R. Colan Associates regarding the moves.
"That building required remedial work that will improve the soil and reinforce the building," MTA spokesperson Kevin Ortiz told The Real Deal. He said the building was structurally weak because of preexisting conditions and the bottom wall was shifting.
The tenants will have to be out of the building while the basement wall is reinforced and the facade repaired, Ortiz said.
An employee at Bradford N. Swett Management, who did not want to be identified, said the MTA had not yet received approval from the company to perform the shoring up work.
Friday, March 19, 2010
REDUCED TO RENT - West 3rd Street & Thompson Street Below Market Value One Bedroom
West Village One Bedroom - West 3rd Street & Thompson - 1/2 Block Away from Washington Square Park
Contact JAD Realty Group for showing times:
610.781.8417
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West Village One Bedroom - West 3rd Street & Thompson - 1/2 Block Away from Washington Square Park
Contact JAD Realty Group for showing times:
Monday, March 15, 2010
Residential rents inch up from earlier in year, but drop from last year
Citi Habitats' February market rental report found that rents inched up slightly from the previous month but fell from the same period last year (see below for full report).
According to the report, which includes only apartments leased by Citi Habitats, the average monthly rent for a studio increased 2 percent to $1,756 in February from $1,725 the previous month. Both figures are down from $1,764 in February of last year, according to Citi Habitats data.
Average rents for one- and two-bedrooms each increased 1 percent in February of 2010 from the previous month, the report found, with one-bedroom rents rising to $2,335 from $2,318 and three-bedroom rents increasing to $3,283 from $3,257. The average rent for a one-bedroom fell 3 percent to $2,405 from February of 2009, and two-bedroom rents fell 6 percent year-on-year from $3,483.
According to the report, the average rent for a three-bedroom apartment in February 2010 was $4,347, roughly on par with the previous month but down 4 percent from $4,528 last year.
Vacancy of rental apartments for February 2010 was 1.54 percent, the report found, virtually the same as January's figure of 1.59 percent. The report estimated that were approximately 10,355 available Manhattan rental apartments available at any given time in February.
Citi Habitats said it brokered "over 775 transactions" in February, but did not release the exact figure, saying it was "similar" to the number of deals it did in the same period of last year.
Manhattan's rental market is known for its lack of transparency, and the Citi Habitats data is one of several competing and often contradictory reports.
Could virtual doormen replace the real thing?
Doormen of New York -- watch your backs.
James Bond-like facial- and voice-recognition programs -- cheaper than humans -- could kill the need for the uniformed doorman guarding city buildings, one security firm says.
"Imagine walking into your building -- and you are the key," said Alon Alexander of Kent Security Services, a provider of "virtual doorman" services.
Hundreds of buildings around the city are already being monitored with video cameras and audio communication instead of live doormen, according to some estimates. But Kent's addition of scanning technology, called biometrics, would take the computerized entry system further.
And the economics of man versus machine could loom large in current talks between building owners and 30,000 human doormen whose contracts expire on April 20.
Here's how the new door would work:
As soon as a tenant walks to the door of his building, a camera snaps 40 pictures of him per second and compares the images with those it has on file. If a match is found, the tenant is allowed in.
Otherwise, there's a curt greeting and the query: "Do you live in the building?" The person states his name and where he is headed, and the computer employs voice recognition that includes an emotion detector.
If the computer recognizes the voice, the person is let in. If it doesn't, central security staffers can check by phone.
Still, "no one has seen this in action yet," Alexander conceded.
He said the biometric door costs $15,000. Doormen make $40,000 a year, according to their union, 32BJ SEIU.
But "there's no replacing people with machines and maintaining the same professional service for security," argued union spokesman Matt Nerzig.
And some things money can't buy, doormen insist.
"Humans don't malfunction as often as computers do," noted Mike Zarowny, 53, a doorman at Vesta 17 in Chelsea.
West Village doorman Jamel Salty, 64, said, "A computer is not going to help tenants carry their bags."
Friday, March 12, 2010
Upper Broadway as a Young Boulevard
THIRTY years ago, Broadway north of 96th Street was a vibrant but shabby area, its Hispanic groceries and Chinese restaurants mixed with declining Edwardian apartment houses and S.R.O. hotels.
Now most of this stretch has turned over a gold-plated leaf, especially as a new pair of towering condominiums at 100th Street settles in. A short walk up the 10 blocks to 106th Street takes an inquiring walker from wood frame to glassy modern.
These blocks of Broadway were built up in the late 1890s with six- and seven-story apartment houses, like the Wilmington at the southeast corner of 97th Street, and are pleasant enough. However, at the otherwise retiring Wilmington, someone grew a little frame penthouse on top. With its pitched roof, dormer and window bay, it might be a cottage from the neighborhood’s days as truck farm and chicken yard.
On the east side, at 98th Street, two 12-story apartment houses introduce a grandeur otherwise lacking on what could have been a magnificent boulevard. On the south corner, the 1911 Borchardt, by Rouse & Goldstone, has rich classical ornament, like the terra-cotta cornice along the fourth-floor level. It has the crispest little guttae, the droplike forms on the bottom, you are likely to see on the West Side.
Running up the front is a wonderful series of three-sided window bays, their metalwork picked out in buff and light green. ’Tis a pity that the noble Borchardt has suffered the Curse of the Dead-Brown Replacement Window.
Across the street the Gramont, of the same date, is by another quality firm, Blum & Blum, and like the Borchardt has rich light-colored brickwork with deep-struck joints. Anyone who goes around to the entrance on 98th will also be taken with the spectacular lobby front, a sumptuous, expostulating Parisian screen of ironwork, recently repaired and refinished.
Beyond 99th, on both sides of Broadway, run the Ariel East and Ariel West, both recently built by the Extell Development Company. Tall, squarish, glassy towers with maroon trim, these are the buildings that West Siders love to hate, out of scale with the neighborhood and way too fancy, so it is said.
Me, I like them. Is the stodgy, slightly worn-out quality of the West Side so fragile it cannot accept a couple of mirror-glass lightning bolts? Extell has also taken what was once a dodgy block and flooded the zone by building the two structures.
Next door to the Ariel East on the south is the Art Deco Metro Theater, designed in 1932 by the inventive Boak & Paris and closed for several years. This lovely little pink-and-black terra-cotta jewel is dirtier than an old sneaker, but the original whimsy is still clear in the modernistic comedy/tragedy medallion in the center.
The architect’s elevation drawings show that the metalwork is aluminum, at the time exotic for architectural decoration, with interlaced neon lights. Urban Outfitters was going to move in last year, but that deal, like others before it, fell through, and the temporary steel supports for the marquee are beginning to look pretty permanent.
On the north side of Ariel East is the 1909 Allenhurst. The architect, William Rouse, not yet in partnership with Lafayette Goldstone, gave it a mesmerizing crisscross diaper-work brick pattern in the topmost section. And he evinced a decent respect for the opinions of others by bringing the decoration around the side wall of the building, called a return, a rarely seen but very civilized gesture.
Diagonally across the 100th Street intersection is the oldest building in the area, the three-story 1871 Boulevard House, a wooden building with an intricate cornice. Years ago, I sometimes went to the Tacita de Oro on the ground floor for Spanish-Chinese food; at the time, the clapboard on the upper stories was peeling pink paint. In 1993 the Metro Diner moved in, tricked up the ground floor in faux-Deco style, and covered the upper floors in aluminum siding, apparently to avoid a possible landmark designation.
The apartment house right next door on Broadway was originally the Ben-Hur. Indeed this section presents a ghostly gazetteer of forgotten apartment names: Navarre, Aragon, El Casco, Friesland, Karlsruhe, an encyclopedia of middle-class aspirations. A few have been revived, but the famous charioteer is not yet among them.
At the Ben & Jerry’s at 104th Street, there is a dazzling glass mosaic in an abstract design of “spinach green, carrot red and butter yellow,” as The Architectural Record described it in 1947. The artist, Max Spivak, made it for the Riker’s restaurant chain, and its survival is a miracle on Broadway.
The huge 1913 Cleburne apartment house stretches from West End to Broadway at 105th, and is worth seeing for its off-norm touches of Arts and Crafts and its private carriageway, all designed by Schwartz, Gross & Marcus.
The Cleburne would not be here were it not for the sinking of the Titanic, in April 1912. Isidor Straus, a partner in R. H. Macy & Co., and his wife, Ida, had occupied an old wooden house on the site since 1884. The month after the Strauses went down with the ship, their children sold the property, and the Cleburne soon joined the march of apartment buildings up Broadway.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Illegal Conversion Boots Tenants From 1182 Broadway
Our tipline has been abuzz this morning with rumors that all tenants were evacuated yesterday from rental building 1182 Broadway. We checked with the Department of Buildings—which has one "work without permit" violation posted for the property—to get the full story. And that is? A DOB spokesperson tells us the agency investigated after anonymous complaints and found that the property was illegally converted from a 16-floor manufacturing building into residential apartments. The building had no fire sprinklers, no secondary exit, and only one stairwell, which could trap tenants in the building in the event of a fire, so the DOB slapped owner Mocal Enterprises with violations for converting the building without a permit and for occupancy contrary to DOB regulations. According to DOB, tenants were evacuated with the aid of city agencies and the Red Cross. So who called in the complaint? That's the big question. The grungy neighborhood (WhoDi to us) has been branded the "next big thing" thanks to a crop of new luxury boutique hotels opening in the area. The hipsterest of them all, the Ace Hotel, is right next door.
We hunted up a few old listings for the building, where rents appear to have ranged from $2,900 to $6,000. According to one description, here's what that money would have gotten you:
Zoned as a live-work space, this renovated loft offers an industrial vision of New York that is fast disappearing...Featuring free laundry on every floor and bathrooms big enough to fit a mini-Cooper in, these apartments also offer massive closets and giant pewter windows. If you are looking for Zen gardens and tenant lounges then this building is not for you. But if a taste of raw space - think concrete floors in some units and spectacular wrap around antique windows in the two-bedroom units - makes your artistic juices start to flow, then this might do the trick.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
The Renter Roadblock
At the Chelsea Modern, a new condo on West 18th Street, renters are being encouraged to become owners by a 10 percent discount.
IT seemed like a smart idea at the time.
The apartment was lovely — new construction, three bedrooms, three and a half baths, nearly 2,000 square feet on the Upper East Side. The asking price was $2.995 million. A year earlier it would have gone fast.
But this was early 2009 and the economy was in tatters. Offers were pathetic — the best, $2.2 million. Forget it, the owners said. We’ll rent the place.
And so they did. With the approval of the condominium board, a family signed a one-year lease for $10,500 a month, with an option to renew for a second year. The owner’s expenses were covered. The plan was working nicely.
Except now the buyer who offered $2.2 million has come back — this time with an offer of $2.83 million, all cash.
“They’re coming up almost to asking price, but I can’t get the renter out,” sighed Victoria Shtainer, a senior vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman, the real estate company. She is holding her breath until April, when she will hear whether the tenants intend to exercise their option to extend the lease for another year.
Over the past year or two, many owners who couldn’t sell — or didn’t dare try — made a similar calculation. Rather than accept an impossibly low offer (if they even had an offer), they decided to rent out their properties. The idea was to cover expenses while waiting for the market to right itself.
But in recent months, a number of these accidental landlords have been surprised to find renewed buyer interest in their properties. The problem is, the renters are happily in place. And that can complicate showings — let alone negotiating an actual deal.
A 4,100-square-foot loft on East 24th Street has sat on the market for nearly two years, despite a drop in price to $3.995 million in July 2009, from $5.535 million in April 2008.
In September 2008, the owners put the place up for rent. When their tenant moved out last summer, with no buyers in sight, they decided to rent it again, though this time the best monthly price they could get was a few thousand dollars lower.
Then last fall, shortly after the new tenant moved in, the long dry spell ended and brokers started showing up with prospective buyers in tow. Now a buyer wants to make an offer, said Gina Tramontano, the exclusive agent and a vice president of Halstead Property. But he’s saying that he will wait until the fourth quarter of the year — after the lease expires.
Ms. Tramontano said the buyer had not explained his reason for holding back. But she observed, “Once buyers hear there is a tenant, they are always concerned that the tenant won’t leave.” And that is even though the loft’s lease has a rider saying the owner can request that the tenant move out, with two months’ notice.
There are other frustrations. Whenever Ms. Tramontano wants to show the apartment, she has to have the permission of the tenants, who are not as motivated as owners to keep it in museumlike shape for viewing. When she arrives with clients, there’s often a wife, a baby and a nanny at home — and the corresponding toys and other evidence of family life.
At least she can show the place. A 19th-century seven-bedroom house in New Canaan, Conn., having failed to sell, has been occupied by a renter since Oct. 1. The lease contains a 90-day “show clause,” which means the house can’t be shown to prospective buyers until July 1 — 90 days before the lease expires.
That was not a problem when prospective buyers were nonexistent. But recently brokers have inquired about the property on behalf of two clients.
“I explained to them that you can buy it with the tenant in place until Oct.1, and I can give you photographs and detailed information about it,” said Mary Higgins, an associate broker at Halstead, who has the exclusive on the property. “But what I can’t do is open the door and let you see it.
“They say, ‘Well, if I’m still in the market in a few months ... ’ ”
The renewed interest in such properties is one indication that the New York area residential real estate market may be starting to stir. But indicators of the market’s health are still mixed. The number of condo and co-op sales in Manhattan was up 8.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009 compared with the fourth quarter of 2008, and it was 10.9 percent higher than the number of sales in the third quarter of 2009, according to a report prepared by Miller Samuel, the real estate appraisal firm, for Prudential Douglas Elliman.
A loft at East 24th Street, left, has a prospective buyer who declines to bid until the tenant’s lease is up. An owner in a building in the East 80s, above, has both an offer and a tenant with an option to stay.
But prices are still slipping. The median sales price in the fourth quarter ($810,000) represented a 4.7 percent drop from the third quarter and was down 10 percent from the fourth quarter of 2008.
Outside of the city, sales numbers for January show signs of life, according to newly released statistics from the New York State Association of Realtors.
In Westchester County, for example, sales of single-family houses jumped 108 percent in January compared with January 2009. The median sale price during that time rose 12.7 percent. In Suffolk County, the number of sales grew 47.6 percent from January 2009 to January 2010. The median sales price, however slipped 0.8 percent during that time — though that was a vast improvement over the 15.7 percent drop from January 2008 to January 2009.
When renters and prospective buyers are involved, the situation is delicate. No owner or broker interviewed for this article would disclose the identity of renters or ask them if they would speak to a reporter. That’s because no one wants to upset a renter. Many owners are hoping their tenants will decline to renew their leases and leave. The last thing an owner wants is to have to pay them off in order to negotiate a deal.
Renting out an apartment may be a good way to keep the cash flowing, but there are roadblocks for owners to consider. Most co-op boards have strict rules about subletting, and some do not allow it at all. Condo boards are typically more lenient. And once renters are in place, it can be difficult to remove them, even if they stop paying rent. In New York City, you cannot evict a tenant without going to court.
In some cases, an ensconced tenant can be an amenity. Megan McGinn, an agent at Elika Associates, a firm that represents buyers in Manhattan and Brooklyn, says many of her prospective buyers are renters, with leases of their own to finish out. These buyers would welcome a tenant in place while they wait for their own leases to be up. “A lot of buyers seem to be coming out of the woodwork right now,” she said, adding that many had been inspired by the federal tax credit for first-time buyers.
Some owners are working to turn their renters into buyers.
Robert Gladstone is the sole managing member of Madison Equities, the developer of the Chelsea Modern, a condominium completed on West 18th Street in fall 2008. In the depths of the summer doldrums last year, he did something he had never done before.
With about 30 of the building’s 47 units sold and the market looking sluggish, he decided to rent out 12 units for a year or 13 months.
“He believed that once someone moved into the building they would have an impulse to say, ‘This feels like home to me’ and have the impulse to stay,” said Dan Tubb, Chelsea Modern’s director of sales.
To nurse that impulse along, Mr. Gladstone moved into the building and invited renters and owners to his apartment for a holiday party.
“We wanted the buyers to interact with the renters,” Mr. Tubb said.
Pressing further, the developer sent a letter to all the renters in January offering a deal — and doing the math to help them see its appeal. Renters were paying $6,500 a month for a two-bedroom two-bath apartment with 1,400 square feet of space. Mr. Gladstone offered the unit at a 10 percent discount from the original asking price, which dropped the price tag to $1.75 million. With 70 percent financing at current rates, the monthly mortgage payments should be about $6,300 a month. The common charge for the building is about $1,200 a month.
But the tax savings — including the mortgage interest deduction on the federal income tax and local homeowner tax relief programs — would effectively bring an owner’s net monthly payment to about $5,100, according to the letter. That would mean monthly savings of more than $1,000.
The numbers seemed to get some attention. Four or five renters have inquired about buying, Mr. Tubb said. (But he would not make any available to speak about their thinking process.)
For some owners, the sudden interest in their properties is creating a tricky new question: Do you really want the renters out, or should you keep them even longer in hopes of getting an even better offer?
Karin Posvar-Picket, a senior vice president of the Corcoran Group, represents a client who rejected a couple of lowball offers on his East Side condo and decided to rent his place out instead. Now, with the lease almost up, he has new offers — but he would rather keep the renters.
“He wants to wait another year till the market really improves,” Ms. Posvar-Picket said.
Wladimir Singer put his three-bedroom condo in the East 70s on the market for sale or rent when he moved to Monaco last spring. There were no nibbles from buyers, but the apartment rented fairly easily, with a family signing a one-year lease at $10,000 a month — almost enough, Mr. Singer said, to cover the mortgage and other costs of carrying the property.
But since the start of the year, three offers have come in, including an all-cash one for $2.8 million from a major bank shopping for its corporate officers.
“We have five to seven parties visiting the apartment each week now,” said Mr. Singer, who had not expected to receive any offers before his tenant’s lease expired. “Sometime after the holidays the interest spiked.”
All that interest has got Mr. Singer thinking: What if he waits even longer? Maybe he could get asking price ... or higher. He will learn in April if the tenants want to extend the lease for another year. If they don’t, he said, he will seriously consider the offers he has.
Or he might look for another renter.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
West Village One Bedroom Rental - Below Market Value, Washington Square Park
West Village - Below Market One Bedroom Rental - West 3rd Street & Sullivan
Contact JAD Realty Group for showing times:
610.781.8417
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West Village - Below Market One Bedroom Rental - West 3rd Street & Sullivan
Contact JAD Realty Group for showing times:
610.781.8417
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