apartments

Manhattan apartment rents stayed flat in September, on par with average rents in the summer and substantially lower than those from early autumn 2007. Rents are down by around $200 across the board since September 2007, in fact, for both doorman and non-doorman buildings, according to a new report from The Real Estate Group New York (PDF). (The report analyzes rents south of Washington Heights.)

The average rent for a doorman one-bedroom, for instance, dropped from $3,881 in September 2007 to $3,692 in July, and then dropped further through September. For two-bedrooms in doorman buildings, the September average was $5,529, down from the summer and down from the same month last year.

The report's analysis alludes to the effects the financial crisis could have on the Manhattan apartment market.  read more »

The weekend Wall Street crisis will affect New York real estate. Here's how:

Apartment sales ~ Manhattan recorded over 10,000 home sales in 2007, but sales numbers have been off throughout the city in 2008. In Manhattan in the second quarter, home sales were down 21.8 percent annually, according to a Miller Samuel-Douglas Elliman report. In Queens, 23.7 percent; and, in Brooklyn, over 43 percent. The Wall Street crisis, due to the inordinate influence of the Street on local apartment and townhouse sales, will likely drive the number of deals further downward as the year ends. This could give a hefty advantage to buyers.  read more »

The wet bar seats eight comfortably; the billiards table is covered in red felt; ESPN blares from the flat-screen television, a salvo of sports scores echoing over the brown leather armchairs; and, next-door, the children are playing in their rec room.

Upstairs, the rooftop terrace is quiet. Several neighbors are lounging on the deck chairs under the gazebo, surveying the brilliant emerald lawn.

Is this suburbia? Not exactly. Two Gold Street is a luxury rental building smack in the middle of the Financial District.

Luxury rentals like this one, where a one-bedroom will set you back between $2,950 and $3,875 monthly, are New York City's answer to the gated community: clean, secure, exclusive (but not out of reach), and outfitted with amenities like grill stations, manicured rooftop lawns, and foosball tables.  read more »

New Stuyvesant Town/Cooper Village watchdog blog The Stuyvesant Town Report, written by an apparently anonymous Stuy Town tenant, chronicles a recent visit by landlord Rob Speyer:

As reported by a member of Stuyvesant Town message board, Tishman Speyer President and Co-CEO Rob Speyer and a group of about nine suits (minus one suit due to an arm in a sling) descended Tuesday morning upon Stuyvesant Town for a tour of the complex. The member accosted the group as they passed him by, telling them what a horrible job they were doing, to which Rob Speyer answered, "Thank you." According to another resident, the group headed around the Oval and into the eastern area of Stuy Town in an examination of what appeared to be, generally, problematic front spaces at some Stuy Town buildings. Notations were being taken down by a nice young man onto large sheets of building diagrams.

Hat tip Curbed.

"Brokers are bottom feeders. Best way to find an apt. is to go to the building where you want to live and ask the super or find who the management agent is and deal with them directly."

"You pay for professional services; that's how the world runs. If you walk into a real estate office asking for someone's time and knowledge, don't complain when you get charged. No management offices charge a broker's fee, that's why it's a broker fee because the broker charges you it for their time and knowledge of the market!!" ["My Rental Broker: 'I'm Just Concerned With Getting You a Place You Love'"]

From a new report (PDF) by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the National Low Income Housing Coalition:

According to the most recent Census numbers, in the past year, the number of renter households in the United States increased by nearly 1 million. By contrast, the number of homeowner households increased by just 139,000. The ability for metropolitan area housing markets to accommodate this shift to rental will vary considerably.  read more »

• 0 comments

The New York City rental apartment market is tied closely to the local economy, more so than the sales market. That market might see foreigners buying a lot of condos even as Americans lose their jobs. But the rental market--it tends to rise and to fall with the city's economy. Generally, job losses and uncertainty in New York translates into more vacancies and lower rents.

So the news that JPMorgan Chase and the Federal Reserve are acquiring Bear Stearns, the world's fifth-largest investment bank and one of New York's most prominent employers, could ultimately be good news for the city's renters. Grimly and pragmatically speaking, any layoffs could reduce the number of people who need to be in the city by thousands. That could free up apartments; and that greater vacancy could drive landlords to drop rents.  read more »

Composer Philip Glass in the March issue of Details:

Q: I understand that in your early days as a composer, you rented a Manhattan loft for 30 bucks.
A: It was down in the Fulton fish market. I paid $30 a month. My friends paid $25, and they thought that I had betrayed the community by allowing the rent to be pushed up that high. I was deeply apologetic for having destabilized the neighborhood.

In December, apartment rents dropped in both Upper West Side and Upper East Side non-doorman buildings, according to a report out Tuesday from brokerage The Real Estate Group New York.

The best deal for a non-doorman studio can be found on the Upper West Side for an average of $1,734 monthly compared to $1,870 on the Upper East Side, the report said. But studios in doorman buildings on the Upper West Side run for $2,737 compared to only $2,499 on the Upper East Side.  read more »

The median sales price of Manhattan apartment buildings below 96th Street rose above $500 a square foot for the first time in the first half of 2007, according to a new report from investment-sales brokerage Massey Knakal and appraisal firm Miller Cicero.

The sales price for elevator apartment buildings reached $517 a foot in the first half of the year and the price for walkups reached $508 a foot. These medians were both sizable increases from the first half of 2006.

Other highlights from the report, including stats on Upper Manhattan apartment buildings, after the jump.  read more »

New York City lost an estimated 6,022 rent-stabilized apartments in 2006, according to a new report from the city's Rent Guidelines Board. Still, this represented 18 percent fewer rent-stabilized apartments than were lost in 2005.

The city now has roughly 1,043,000 rent-stabilized apartments, and 43,000 rent-controlled ones. Also, another 308,000 apartments fall under some other sort of regulation, and about 697,000 apartments are market-rate.  read more »

The vacancy rate for larger Manhattan apartment buildings has dropped to near 2 percent and should remain there or lower for the next several months, according to a new report from investment-sales firm Marcus & Millichap. The report covered market-rate buildings with at least 40 apartments.

Reasons for the tighter vacancy rates are familiar: a strong local economy creates new jobs, which creates the need for places for people to live. The report forecasts that 36,000 jobs will have been created in Manhattan this year, a 1.5 percent increase from last year.  read more »

We noted last week that Bianca Jagger was getting evicted from her rent-stabilized Park Avenue apartment over visa problems (she's a Brit).

A New York Sun editorial asks today: "... why should the taxpayers of New York have provided a wealthy woman for more than 20 years the benefit of a below-market-rate Park Avenue apartment?"

Curbed answers back, though, with one of the most coldly thorough defenses ever of rent-stabilization, which keeps about 1 million apartments in the city below market rate:

No harm no foul, and here's the thing: We all would have done the exact same thing. Lucking into a rent-stabilized Park Avenue apartment is like winning the lottery, without having all those crazy problems that lottery winners all wind up with for some reason. If suddenly you could afford the market-rate rent, would you want to give up the stabilized rate? ... The system is one giant corrupt game, and we all look for ways to take advantage. Kudos to ol' Bianca for holding on to her place for so long.

A partnership of Tishman Speyer and Lehman Brothers finished gobbling up apartment landlord Archstone-Smith earlier this month, and city records yesterday revealed the Manhattan and Brooklyn buildings involved in the takeover:

• 250 West 50th Street
• 245 East 40th Street
• 505 West 54th Street
• 303 East 83rd Street
• 750 Columbus Avenue
• 730 Columbus Avenue
• 510 West 52nd Street
• 515 West 52nd Street
• 180 Montague Street (Brooklyn)

Renters, you have been delivered. Relatively speaking.

A new report (PDF) from brokerage The Real Estate Group shows that average monthly rents in non-luxury buildings below 100th Street dropped from September into October. Apartments remain pricey, but the average landlord may be smiling a little less smugly as he or she asks you to kindly sign the lease.

The most expensive neighborhoods were Tribeca and SoHo, with rents ranging from $3,095 to $6,975 a month in doorman buildings. The least expensive neighborhoods were the Lower East Side, the Upper West Side, and Midtown West, where studios, one-bedrooms, and two-bedrooms in non-doorman buildings went for an average $1,752, $2,230, and $3,231, respectively.

Overall, rents decreased the most in one- and two-bedrooms in doorman buildings. Studio apartment rents stayed stable.

In more fabulous news for renters, The Real Estate Group noted that landlord incentives continue. Some landlords now offer to pay broker fees or first month's rent in order to entice tenants.

Have we entered a prolonged golden age for the Manhattan tenant? Or are landlords taking a autumnal breather before the rents again go higher?

Bianca Jagger, who survived several years of marriage to Mick in the 1970's only to lose him to a Texan, is getting evicted from her rent-stabilized apartment on Park Avenue.

Ms. Jagger's landlord had sued her, claiming the apartment could not be her primary residence because she was in the United States on a tourist visa. Ms. Jagger is a British citizen and has another apartment in London. For her part, Ms. Jagger claimed the landlord only sued her because she sued the landlord in 2003 over mold in the apartment.

Either way, there's one more market-rate apartment in New York City and one less stabilized one. Light a candle and play Let It Bleed.

Reuters reports this morning that Elad Group, the real estate firm that owns the Plaza Hotel, plans to build a 95-story apartment tower on Madison Avenue. At 899 feet, the $450 million tower would be the tallest residential tower in the city and about 71 percent of the height of the Empire State Building, the city's tallest commercial tower. (We're confused by the initial reports, however, which claim Elad plans to build a 75-story tower on an existing 20-story building; 899 feet seems a little short for a 95-story tower. The Chrysler Building, for instance, has 77 stories and is nearly 1,100 feet tall. The Empire State Building's 102 stories stretch over 1,224 feet.)

Elad, owned by Israeli billionaire Yitzhak Tshuva, bought the Plaza in 2004 in a $675 million deal, and is converting most of it into condos.

UPDATE: Elad publicist Lloyd Kaplan tells us that Elad can't talk about anything. "I can give you a 'no comment,'" Mr. Kaplan said. "That's all I can say."

New York magazine's Daily Intellingencer reports that the tower will be 74 stories (that makes a little more sense) and that the architect will be Daniel Libeskind. Still, no one seems to know for sure, and Elad isn't talking. So... stay tuned.

UPDATE 2: The Department of Buildings has no permits approved or awaiting approval for any construction at the Elad-owned Grand Madison condo at 225 Fifth Avenue near Madison Square Park. So, if any building is going up, it's likely not going up there.

A moment of silence for the apartment hunters, please. By the end of the year, vacancy rates for apartments in Manhattan will dip below 2 percent, according to a new report from Marcus & Millichap, an investment-sales firm that doesn’t broker rentals in the city. This would be the lowest vacancy rate since 2000’s 1.2 percent.  read more »

In one of the biggest real estate deals ever, Tishman Speyer and Lehman Brothers have bought Archstone-Smith, the real estate investment trust that owns more than 86,000 apartments nationwide. The $22.2 billion acquisition includes at least 10 buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn. It's the largest such public-to-private acquisition ever among apartment REITs.

For Tishman Speyer, the acquisition may be a welcome change. The company bought Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village in 2006 for more than $5 billion, but most of the apartments in those complexes are protected from market-rate rents by government controls. Not so with the Archstone-Smith apartments. One-bedrooms in the Archstone 39th start now at $4,475 a month; in the Archstone 101 West End, a studio can run toward $2,900 a month.

More on this record deal in tomorrow's print edition of The Observer.  read more »