Final units sale for Striver's Row

Kelly Kreth emailed me with some interesting news about Striver's Row. According to Kelly, Darren Sukenik's exclusive is now 80% sold after only six months on the market. Developers initiated a dropped prices about two weeks ago 10% – 15% for a “final units sale.”


2605 Frederick Douglass Boulevard
APT#: 7A



2605 Frederick Douglass Boulevard
APT#: 1A


2605 Frederick Douglass Boulevard
APT#: 6B

Considering the volatility in the stock market and the huge amount uncertainty affecting the New York City market, it is pretty darn impressive that they were able to get 80% in 6 months.

Safety First

With daylight savings now upon us, this might be a good time not only to turn the clocks back and also check the fire alarms. And if you want to really take a step further you might want setup an emergency evacuation plan.

OpenHouse NYC has a great segment on how to prepare for emergencies in New York City.



It is a great segment that covers all of the bases of deal with emergencies in New York City. In regards to a GO bag, besides including 3 days worth of food and water, a flashlight, first aid kit and important papers, I high recommend having a large sum of cash and a swiss army knife.

You know things are bad when the comic book geeks get involved. Part 2

I recently received this comment about an entry I did in August.

Hey! Miles Perrie here: long time reader, first time writer...

....I'm a psychologist. I make a good living. Can I ask - what is so surprising about me buying a townhouse?

Miles,

Thank you for reading my blog. I was pleasantly surprised to see my entry posted on the Slushfactory. and for all you Slushers out there, I am a frequent poster.

I am assuming that when you mean by "surprising" you are referring to the reaction of all the slushers on the forum including myself when you announced your purchase? If not. Please correct me if I am wrong.

I think the reason why everyone is surprised about your decision is due to the state of the market. As I pointed out in that particular entry the Florida real estate market is in a free fall. When this evolution occurs in the real estate market, that is when buyers usually take a step back, as I have stated in a previous entry, one of the key rules in real estate is never overpay and when the market begins plummeting like it is right now, the smart money doesn't go to the dance no matter how many suitors knock on the door.

You either wait for the bottom or look for a deal that fits your financial requirements.

Real estate, just like any other investment vehicle, does not come as one size fits all. Everyone has different needs and resources. That also goes with personal taste. I bring this up because I am not aware of your financial situation. So I am assuming that you did the numbers and they make sense for you. In the end, all that matters is that you are happy.

Curbed Conquers the World

Just spotted this in the New York Times.

October 30, 2007
Not All Is Gloomy in Real Estate: A Blog Network Attracts Capital
By DAN MITCHELL
The residential real estate market may be troubled, but property-focused Web sites are still attracting visitors and investors.

Curbed.com, a popular real estate blog network with sites in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, has obtained $1.5 million in financing to expand into new cities and add staff members. According to Lockhart Steele, the network’s publisher, traffic is growing 10 percent a month and the site is drawing national advertisers.

Nick Denton, Mr. Steele’s boss when he was managing editor of the Gawker Media blog network, and Zach Nelson, chief executive of NetSuite, a maker of business software, are among the individual investors. Gawker Media also invested.

In some respects, sites like Curbed are insulated from the woes of the real estate market in a way that traditional sites may not be. “We’re not just about real estate,” Mr. Steele said. “People come to the site to talk about their neighborhoods and about life in the city.” This wide focus has helped Curbed draw advertisers like American Express and Volkswagen, Mr. Steele said.

At greater potential risk are national-focused sites like Zillow.com and Realtor.com that depend on an active market of buyers and sellers to thrive. Nonetheless, Zillow, which estimates home values, last month obtained $30 million in its latest round of financing, bringing the total to $87 million for the site, which was started less than two years ago. And its traffic in the third quarter was 20 percent higher than in the period a year earlier, according to Spencer Rascoff, Zillow’s vice president for marketing and chief financial officer.

It has also begun posting home listings provided by brokerage firms. The first of these to participate is ERA.

“The housing slowdown has actually increased people’s appetite and interest,” Mr. Rascoff said. “In a crazy market like this, both buyers and sellers are trying to get an edge.”

Advertising-supported sites seem, at least for now, to be on safer ground than those that rely heavily on “showcase listings” that sellers pay for.

“Any site that charges fees to brokers will be hurt the most,” said Steve Murray, editor of the newsletter Real Trends. Realtor.com, run by the National Association of Realtors, remains the top real estate destination on the Web, with more than five million unique visitors a month — down only slightly in the last six months, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. If the downturn lasts long enough, “everyone suffers,” said Brad Inman, founder and publisher of the real estate news service Inman News. During bad times, “there’s always an uptick first” in real estate advertising, he said. “Nobody’s free of the dark shadow of a down market.”

Still, Mr. Inman was one of the lead investors of Curbed.com, in part because Curbed “is not a direct real estate play,” he said. “I didn’t even think of it in context of the market.”

I want to congratulate Lockhart Steele on this great news. Curbed is the pioneer in the field of real estate blogging and I am happy to see that they are not only still around but they are expanding their operations. For all of you investors out there consider Curbed a value stock. They have only just begin to lay a smackdown of profitable proportions.

This news also serves a motivator to get off my duff and put some ideas I have for the Property Grunt to use. More on that later.

Ghost walk

Saturday was the final night of the New Bern Ghost walk and some members of my lunch Rotary volunteered to help at the Cedar Grove Cematary. There were 5 groups of actor's playing various roles with a common theme pertaining to the occupancy of New Bern by Union forces during the Civil War. The weather was perfect, the crowds were quite large, and everyone seemed to enjoy their evening stroll through a time in New Bern's history that has become somewhat blurred with time. Quite a bit of money was raised for the New Bern Historical society and me, I found it to be a haunting experience.

The Exchange

Recently I was approached by ta representative of Openhouse NYC with a proposal of content exchange. This is a pilot program which will go last for limited period. In exchange for a video segment, they will post a Property Grunt entry of my choice.

Personally I am quite flattered and jazzed with this new relationship. Open House NYC is one of the premiere shows focusing on New York City real estate and can be seen every Sunday morning at 8:30 AM. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship.

This particular video piece is about a subject that is close to my heart. Noise.

And it is probably the most thorough piece on how to deal with noise from the physical to legal options.

Roll Call: The Recession edition

Let the Roll Call begin.

Countrywide does the right thing. For themselves.

Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest home lender and loan servicer, announced yesterday that it would help borrowers restructure some $16 billion in mortgages to avoid foreclosure or financial stress associated with quickly rising adjustable-rate loans.

As many of you know, I am not the biggest fan of Countrywide and as far as I am concerned they really had no choice. First of all if they foreclosed on all those buyers they would end becoming one of the biggest landlords of distressed properties which is bad because they do not have the infrastructure to be property managers and brokers and would have to outsource those tasks which would cost them more money.

Another option would have been to sell the company and let it be someone else's quagmire but that option was eighty-sixed for obvious reasons.

The SEC has been watching them carefully ever since it was reported that Angelo R. Mozilo has been made some well timed sales of his company's stock. So they need as much good press as possible.


US Home sales have dropped again for September.

US existing home sales fell 8.0 percent in September as a persistent housing slump continued to weigh on the property market and the world's biggest economy, an industry group said Wednesday.
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) said in a monthly snapshot that sales of existing homes and apartments tumbled to a seasonally adjusted rate of 5.04 million units in September from 5.48 million in August.

The drop was worse than expected. Most economists had only expected sales to decline to around 5.25 million.

As I have stated before, if you can, wait it out. Of course there are others who disagree and say this is the time to jump in and you are free to follow their path.

Some rich guy states the obvious.

Jim Rogers, the veteran investor who predicted the 1999 commodities rally, declared that the US economy was "in recession" as he said he would take flight from the dollar and switch his investments into currencies including the Chinese yuan.

Everyone is raving about China that they are the next big thing. However, I am not as bullish on China. Yes, they are experiencing hyper growth in their economy. But if you read the NYT's coverage on China, well let me put it this way. The candle that burns twice as bright burns out twice as fast. In the near future I plan on doing more entries on China and how much of an impact it will have on our future.


This article has been getting heavy rotation on the New York Time.


Buyers Pounce on Deals as Homes Go on the Block

In a down real estate market, they came to buy. They came early, they came in numbers and they came with bank checks for $5,000.

By 10 a.m. Saturday, more than 700 people filled a hall in the convention center here for what real estate agents say is the largest auction of foreclosed properties ever in Minnesota, with more than 300 houses or apartments for sale in two days. Opening bids ranged from $1,000 — for a three-bedroom house — to $729,000, for a five-bedroom house on 11.9 acres. The crowd was standing-room only, with more waiting to enter. Some were looking for homes, others for investments.

“It’s a symptom of the foreclosure crisis,” said Jim Davnie, a Democratic state representative in Minnesota. Mr. Davnie said he had concern that areas already hit by the foreclosure crisis would now be hit by investors buying properties to rent them out, “which makes neighborhoods less stable than owner-occupied housing.”

I am not a big fan of these auctions. They are only suitable for people who have insider knowledge about the property that is for sale and they are not ideal places for first time buyers. However from this article it appears that people are listening to their bank accounts rather than their emotions. Also these auctions play a key role in the recovery of this market. The quicker these distressed properties move, the quicker we will be able to get this economy back its feet.