Today’s batch of economic data persists in painting a lackluster picture of the U.S. housing market. This morning, the U.S. Census bureau released its July figures for sales of new homes. It wasn’t pretty; sales of new single-family houses plummeted 12 percent from June to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 276,000. That’s the lowest Read More
Anyone who needed convincing that the economy is on the rails should’ve tried selling a house last month. In July, sales of gently-used single-family homes in the U.S. plummeted to a 15-year low, according to the National Association of Realtors. Existing-home sales came in at an annualized rate of 3.8 million. The slowdown was worse than Wall Street Read More
Let’s call it a housing bounce this time around.
The Manhattan apartment market, laden only last year with satisfied predictions of a steady decline, appears on the up and up, if the latest batch of quarterly market reports are any guide (they are—though, they are not meant to be understood in real time, but instead cover Read More
The Apthorp, one of the Upper West Side’s most iconic and colossal buildings, is three weeks and six days from the biggest moment of its 103-year-old life. If 25 apartments haven’t been sold by Sept. 15, the building’s long, zigzagging, tortured condo conversion will have to end and start anew, according to state rules.
On Read More
Two co-op owners started a blog about apartments… and a conversation about New York Read More
Look to the condos! Their once stiff sales are growing flaccid. Co-ops regain prominence, Read More
The New York Times on the local housing market: “Even at the peak of the spring buying season, brokerage offices across the city have been eerily quiet, buyers have been holding out for steep discounts and the inventory of unsold apartments has been growing.”
That was June 1989. A years-long wave of co-op conversions Read More
You know how this ends. Prudential Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel have published a mammoth analysis of the Manhattan housing market from 1999 through 2008. The findings are predictable: prices shot up. The average price per square foot for an apartment in 1999 was $400; a decade later it was over Read More
This morning’s Observer reports that Andrei Vavilov, the Russian oligarch who sued the Plaza’s developer to get out of his $53.5 million deal for a two-unit triplex penthouse, compromised by paying a bit more than $11 million for the smaller penthouse unit.
Mr. Vavilov has already put the 2,906-square-foot apartment back on the market, Read More
It’s probably overdramatic to call this the great reckoning, but, then again, two of the primmest, most significant, czar-worthy pieces of New York real estate have taken massive price cuts in two days.
Yesterday, the asking price for a fourth-floor duplex at 740 Park, owned by the estate of the former co-op board president, went Read More
