Prudential Douglas Elliman

Sorry, outer-borough bargain-hunters; the median sales price in Queens actually increased slightly to $498,500 in the first quarter of 2008, compared to $492,900 in the same period last year, according to Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Q1 2008 Long Island/Queens Market Report.

Credit all the new high-end developments coming on-line, not increasing demand, for the price hike.  read more »

This morning, no surprises, omnipotent Dolly Lenz was named Prudential Douglas Elliman’s number-one broker. And she doesn’t quite care.

“I only got there for the last few minutes. I was in a meeting, literally, with a major banking group, and should not have gone,” she told me, two hours after the ceremony. “They texted me when it was time to get in the car and get there”--she has four Blackberries. “I literally got in the car and went down there and left. I heard no speeches, heard no awards.”  read more »

The only thing more exciting than today’s news about the upcoming sale of Bob Guccione’s townhouse (or about Sharon Baum's Vespa), is Prudential Douglas Elliman’s annual awards ceremony, taking place right this moment, until noon, at Cipriani 42nd Street.

It’s the stuff real estate dreams are made of! Annual broker awards, especially at a monolith like Elliman, are about money, status, competitiveness, salesmanship, hierarchy, and of course, self-celebration.

Yet Elliman, it turns out, does not appreciate it when real estate reporters try to attend. After a series of e-mails and phone calls last night with Elliman’s public relations team, I was turned away at the softly red-lit entrance to the 65-foot-high, 87-year-old ballroom today at 9:12 a.m.—first by one well-dressed woman, then a second nice woman and suited man came over too.  read more »

Prudential Douglas Elliman's fourth-quarter Manhattan housing market report, authored by appraiser Jonathan Miller, is now available online (PDF). It showed, among other stats, that apartment prices had ascended to an all-time average high of over $1.4 million.

Queens home sales dropped 27.2 percent from the fourth quarter of 2006 to the fourth quarter of 2007, according to a new report from brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman and research firm Radar Logic. Sales also dropped from the third quarter 28 percent, suggesting that the largely suburban borough is mimicing much of the nation rather than its fellow boroughs to the west and south, Manhattan and Brooklyn.  read more »

Here's a look at condo and co-op sales in the fourth quarter of 2007 from the Radar Logic-Prudential Douglas Elliman report.  read more »

Luxury apartments drove the Manhattan housing market in the fourth quarter of 2007. Here's some nuggets from the Radar Logic-Prudential Douglas Elliman report:  read more »

The average sales price for a Manhattan condo has grown by nearly $800,000 this decade, marching to $1,750,634 by the end of 2007, according to a report from brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman and research firm Radar Logic. That's an 89 percent increase from the year-end average in 2000, and is 17.8 percent above the fourth-quarter average in 2006.

Significantly, this upward march of condo prices included September 11. After the terrorist attacks, much of Manhattan's residential real estate market softened amid a cascade of pessimism about the city's ability to fully recover.  read more »

Linda Stein, the original celebrity real-estate broker, was found by her daughters bludgeoned to death Tuesday night in her Fifth Avenue apartment.

Ms. Stein, who sat down for an interview with The Observer in May, became a broker after her breakup with Seymour Stein of Sire Records. Before that, she had been a fixture on the downtown music scene, helping to form the careers of New York artists like The Ramones and Madonna. She was also the lifelong friend of Elton John, who issued the following statement on hearing of her death: “I’m absolutely shocked and upset. She’s been a friend for over 37 years and will be greatly missed. She did so much for breast cancer and was a huge supporter of my AIDS foundation.”

Here's The New York Times:

Ms. Stein’s body was found face down in the living room in a pool of blood, the police said. She was wearing a sweatshirt with a hood, which was pulled over her head. Investigators at first believed the bleeding could have resulted from a fall, but when the hood was pulled back, a severe skull injury was exposed. Yesterday, the medical examiner’s office ruled the death a homicide.

Ms. Stein had many tumultuous relationships in her life, but investigators have not focused on any particular people, and did not comment on possible motives, a law enforcement official said. Investigators said they thought Ms. Stein was seen alive earlier on Tuesday, and they were trying to determine who was with her later that day.

UPDATE: The Observer's May interview with Stein can be found here.

UPDATE: An update on the police investigation can be found here.

To paraphrase Beresford resident Jerry Seinfeld: What's the deal with Dolly Lenz?

In August, the Broker of Brokers told The New York Sun that the higher-end real estate market in New York had stumbled sharply:

"I've been doing this 20 years — I've never seen anything change this fast."

This morning, two months later, the New York Post has Ms. Lenz saying:

"I'd say traffic has more than doubled than this time last year, which is beyond comprehension," says Prudential Douglas Elliman vice chairman Dolly Lenz.

 read more »

We’ve taken a look at the new third-quarter housing numbers for Queens from Jonathan Miller and Prudential Douglas Elliman, and it looks like prices kept falling through the summer into the fall--this time, along with sales.

The average home sales price did increase from the quarter before (when it was $482,971) to reach $484,847. But it's barely noticeable against the larger drop from the third quarter of last year, when the average was $499,388.

The median price also dropped, but more steeply. The third quarter's $455,000 is 3 percent lower than the second’s $469,000 and 9 percent below the $500,000 in the third quarter of 2006.

So, while the higher-end properties in the land of the 7-train may be sustaining high prices, the average property is getting cheaper.

But, in a change from last quarter’s sales increase, the Queens market slowed down over the summer.  read more »

Prudential Douglas Elliman will hold a grand opening for its first Park Slope office tomorrow evening. This office, located at 154 Seventh Avenue between Carroll Street and Garfield Place, comes on the heels of archrival the Corcoran Group announcing a Williamsburg location.

And the invasion of the boroughs by Manhattan brokers continues unabated...

You will never likely again have as a good a chance as you did the last few years to buy a home in Manhattan. The third quarter housing numbers, out yesterday, all but slammed the door shut to homeownership for perhaps a generation of both present and future New Yorkers.

The average apartment sale price increased 2.7 percent from the second quarter to $1,369,486, according to a report prepared by appraiser Jonathan Miller for brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman. And the average price per square foot hit a record high of $1,144.

Yet, plenty of people are still willing to pay. The average time a listing stayed on the market for the third quarter was 123 days, compared to 150 for the same time last year. And sales, already brisk for 2007, were up 65.6 percent over the third quarter of 2006.

These increases happened against a backdrop of relative chaos for the local housing market—in particular, the credit market problems that have made getting the sort of large mortgages necessary for Manhattan ownership much more difficult.  read more »

The Real Estate Board of New York sent out a release this afternoon saying it would demonstrate on Thursday for the media its new Web portal for city home buyers and renters, called ResidentialNYC.com. The portal will become available to the public on Friday. But the release included nothing about the participation of the Corcoran Group and Prudential Douglas Elliman, the two largest residential brokerages in the New York City metro region.

The New York Times reported in April that neither brokerage would participate in the portal, which has been a long time coming to the often fractiously terrotorial industry. (Citi Habitats, the city's largest rental agency, also would not be participating, according to the Times, as it falls under the corporate umbrella of Corcoran.) ResidentialNYC.com will collect exclusive listings of homes for sale and rent from REBNY-member brokerages. The media demonstration will be led by Steven Spinola, REBNY's president.

We have a call out to REBNY about the status of Corcoran and Elliman's participation, and are checking with the brokerages.