Oliver Haydock
“Business is down, there is no question about it,” said Brian Brady, the design director of Southampton-based Brady Design Inc., a high-end architecture and interior design company. This time of year, Mr. Brady is usually finishing up a few building projects so that his wealthy clients can move into their new homes by Memorial Day, but 2009 has been different; he doesn’t have a single Hamptons project in the works, and the other part of... MORE >
Holy cow, the Hamptons are affordable! Well, not really, but they are certainly more affordable this year than last, according to a new Douglas Elliman-Miller Samuel report (PDF). It’s abundantly clear that the collapse of the Wall Street economy is largely to blame here, and the wild spending out in the Hamptons, where moguls of all shapes, sizes and colors competed for prime real estate, is over, at least until the Manhattan-based economy picks... MORE >
Location: The first-quarter Hamptons’ market reports are on the way and should be released this week and next. What will people be talking about?... MORE >
The median sales price in the North Brooklyn condo market dropped to $565,128 in the first quarter of 2009, down 2.5 percent annually and 1.1 percent quarterly. Pity... MORE >
In the psychological pantheon of renters, the Financial District might as well seem the New Harlem. It's quickly becoming the strapped Manhattanite's least expensive option before moving to... MORE >
Mike Pelfrey’s 2009 season did not start well. Yesterday, in the first inning of his first start of the season, the 25-year-old pitcher faced nine Reds hitters and gave up four runs, thanks to two walks, two extra-base hits and an untimely error charged to shortstop Jose Reyes. Struggling with his command, Pelfrey danced around trouble the rest of the night, and departed after five innings without giving up another run.... MORE >
Jonathan Miller, author of a popular Manhattan housing report for Douglas Elliman, recalls that when he first reported a slowdown in the sales market, way back in 2005, disbelieving brokers called him, griping about the validity of his numbers. “You could feel the tension in the brokerage community, because it was the first issuance of bad news after a huge run-up from 2003 to 2005,” Mr. Miller, president and CEO of appraiser Miller Samuel, said.... MORE >
During the giddy days of the housing boom, perhaps no single word quite defined Manhattan’s zooming sales market quite like “luxury.” Everyone was obsessed with it and wanted to buy it; most people paid for it, even if it wasn’t what they got. Those days are definitively over, with last week's first-quarter market reports unmistakably showing a screeching slowdown amid the top 10 percent of the sales... MORE >
According to several first-quarter Manhattan housing reports released today - including ones from the Corcoran Group and Property Shark (PDF); Prudential Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel; Brown Harris Stevens (PDF) and Halstead Property (PDF); and StreetEasy - condo and co-op s... MORE >
Manhattan doormen, ably trained as they are in the art of regulating traffic in and out of the city’s abodes, might want to start battening down the hatches: The economy … is … coming. In these troubled economic times, some residential building workers, who are members of the union 32BJ, are finding their services superfluous to requirements in the city, with some union members already losing... MORE >
On a recent Wednesday night, Antonio Palumbo, a 27-year-old IT manager at Blue Man Productions, and his 25-year-old fiancé, Joanna Cambareri, a digital sales associate at People.com, were sitting in an Upper East Side Starbucks, talking about their decision to buy an apartment in Manhattan, and explaining why they were looking to buy in a market defined by two knee-buckling trends: uncertainty; and falling... MORE >
New theory: As the stock market continues to go down, down, down, Manhattan’s apartment vacancy rate will go up, up, up. Back in August, before Lehman Brothers imploded, the vacancy rate was 1.39 percent in Manhattan, according to statistics from Citi Habitats. Their February report, available here (PDF), indicates a 2.46 percent vacancy rate, considerably higher than January’s 2.24 percent rate and exponentially higher than last February’s rate of 1.31... MORE >
Location: When did you start tracking foreclosure data at PropertyShark? Mr. Staniford: We started tracking foreclosures since the beginning of the company, which was about six years ago. It really started out at a very low level; we actually had one person going down to the Brooklyn auctions. Once we started getting a following, we expanded our services, and now we let users look at the results of... MORE >
