One winter evening in 2006, host Martin Bashir’s voice intoned over the opening of Nightline: “Meet the brash, young real estate assassin, selling lavish dream apartments to clients with money to burn.”
The TV screen bled to an earnest-looking Michael Shvo. “When you see a photo of the New York skyline,” the 32-year-old informed us, “these are buildings I made happen.”
And what made Mr. Shvo happen? Read More
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
The heartwarming stories of people who are avoiding dubious foreclosures carry with them a perverse downside: Legal wrangling over foreclosure filings will prolong the time it takes for U.S. home prices to find a bottom, Bloomberg reports.
Former General Motors subsidiary GMAC has lately drawn attention as lawyers charged that the mortgage lender had Read More
In my last column, I reviewed the profound implications employment data has on the fundamentals of the real estate market. While no other metric has more of a direct impact on both commercial and residential market dynamics, there are several other indicators that we keep a close eye on, each of which provides insight into Read More
The cover of this week's Time, the Sept. 6 issue that says "Rethinking Homeownership" in very big letters, shows a nice yellow suburban American house against a deep blue sky. If you're the type to spend a lot of time in the magazine's nifty cover archives, it will remind you of something.
In Read More
On Sunday, in honor of the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, President Obama stopped in for a chat with NBC News' Brian Williams. And after some Katrina-related patter (Williams: Is the BP spill your Katrina? -- Obama: Nope!), Brian Williams popped a question about the U.S. economy: "Do you have anything new on the Read More
Following last week's dismal reports on the U.S. housing market's July performance, the Obama administration indicated over the weekend it's ready to pour additional money into the hole of debt and unemployment where many homeowners currently find themselves. In the offing: emergency loans for the jobless and government assistance in home refinancing.
But will Read More
In a reversal of recent trends, the number of people who let their mortgage payments slide for a month past the due date jumped to 3.5 percent in the second quarter, according to a survey by the Mortgage Bankers of America.
That's down from a high of 3.77 percent reached in the economically calamitous first Read More
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 all-time 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 had 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 deals negotiated 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 the 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 had Read More
