My month was spent looking at New Developments both in New York and Israel. More specifically, Tel Aviv in Israel and on the West Side in Chelsea and Clinton. I know that I’m a New York City broker, but my week in Tel Aviv was eye opening, in terms of views these towers offer, the
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Very few units have hit the Spring market. 422 west 20th is one of them. Nearly everything was in contract by the time the word spread; the west chelsea adherents snapped up the units quite quickly. My feeling on the building was that it attracts a narrower band of buyer than is typically meant to
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Whether I’m speaking to a $3mm buyer, or a $500k buyer, some of the conversation is the same- mortgage rates are simply too low to pass up. Even someone who can afford to pay cash is taking advantage of rates. At a 40-50% effective tax bracket, along with the tax deduction of mortgage interest, turns
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The question that many people will ask each other is “How’s business?” Certainly anyone I speak to will want to know, “How’s the market?” If I often deflect the question about a couple of thoughts or paragraphs, it’s just to be able to listen to others. Where the real estate market falls into the general
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From an Email from the Real Estate Board of New York: Private sector employment in New York City rose by 65,200, or 2.0 percent, to 3,251,200 for the 12-month period ending February 2012. Job growth occurred in professional and business services (+30,300), leisure and hospitality (+15,300), trade, transportation and utilities (+11,900), financial activities (+8,000). Job
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I’m getting differing views on where mortages will be over the new few months. The Fed laid out that the rates they determine will not change until 2014. But mortgage brokers are telling me that they expect a spike in rates from historic lows. What will it be? C-SPAN, the most boring channel on the
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As I think about what to share each month on the blog, I break the newsletter into its pieces, including the New Development Round-Up. This month, I was remarking to myself that I didn’t have any new developments to share- and my mind started to riff on this. No new developments to share. Well, almost
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What is on my mind this month is gratitude. I am grateful, for the sake of so many sellers, that the market in Manhattan seems to substantively moved past a bottom. Pick your metaphor: Turned a corner, come out of the woods, what have you. To quote the great band Florence and the Machine, “The
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Live today, I am so pleased to launch a Harris Residential Team website as a companion to my firm’s site, www.bhsusa.com. The website is www.harrisresidential.com – which will replace the current WordPress site which has faithfully hosted my blog for a long time. This will be a more effective way for me to share with
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The bread and butter of a real estate business is having properties to sell. Thank goodness for the ownership of Vanderbilt Appraisal Company, who give me and my team accurate information about the number of listings in Manhattan and help me understand trends and forecasts. Their recent report showed that the sales volume actually dipped
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