On Feb. 8, the city’s biggest building-sales brokerage, Massey Knakal, blasted a press release announcing the sale of a narrow, four-story, red-brick building along First Avenue, a block southwest of Stuyvesant Town. The walk-up rested snugly between a larger building cloaked in mesh and fronted by scaffolding and a similar-sized, white building. A chicken joint Read More
I was out of the country when Jimmy McMillan of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party put on his gubernatorial debate performance, and have only just now gotten around to subscribing to his newsletter. As best I can tell, Mr. McMillan’s platform is that New York City rents are too damn high and that’s Read More
Is the commercial real estate market too optimistic?
Talk with some of the market’s pros—including top executives and brokers—and you will quickly encounter a common refrain: Things are bad, sure, but they’re getting better. “What we’re seeing is much more activity and interest,” said an exec this month at one of New York’s biggest brokerages. Read More
Perusing statistics on the city’s biggest commercial property deals is like going to the Empire State Building’s observation deck with tourist friends from out of town: You know it’s supposed to mean something, but New York can be so much cooler.
The statistics underline just how far New York’s property sales market has fallen, and Read More
From April through September of last year, the 15 biggest commercial real estate investors in New York traded over $16.17 billion in property. Over the next six months, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the new 15 biggest traded around $1.892 billion, or barely one-tenth as much.
It’s not so much the dollar amounts—everyone knows Read More
Jonathan Miller, author of a popular Manhattan housing report for Douglas Elliman, recalls that when he first reported a slowdown in the sales market, way back in 2005, disbelieving brokers called him, griping about the validity of his numbers.
“You could feel the tension in the brokerage community, because it was the first issuance Read More
Manhattan doormen, ably trained as they are in the art of regulating traffic in and out of the city’s abodes, might want to start battening down the hatches: The economy … is … coming. In these troubled economic times, some residential building workers, who are members of the union 32BJ, are finding their services superfluous Read More
On a recent Wednesday night, Antonio Palumbo, a 27-year-old IT manager at Blue Man Productions, and his 25-year-old fiancé, Joanna Cambareri, a digital sales associate at People.com, were sitting in an Upper East Side Starbucks, talking about their decision to buy an apartment in Manhattan, and explaining why they were looking to buy in a Read More
Pop! That’s the implosion of New York’s seemingly indestructible hotel industry, which this January had one of its worst months of the past six years.
According to Smith Travel Research, an industry research firm based in Nashville, Tenn., the citywide occupancy rate in January was 59.5 percent, an annual decrease of Read More
A prospective tenant in Manhattan recently included her unemployment payments as financial ballast on her rental application. Instead of being mocked or disregarded, the application was accepted, according to Marc Lewis, whose Century 21 NY Metro represents the landlord.
Oh, my, how times have changed.
Anecdotes abound about ready-to-negotiate landlords and falling rents. Read More
