This Is New York City, On Crack

This time of year all the new college grads want apartments in the East Village and the Lower East Side. I've been in Manhattan since 1999, which wasn't that long ago, and even then that far downtown and east wasn't exactly the prime destination for the young and upwardly mobile. Apartments were dumps, had bugs, and not every block was as pristine as it was now. That's all thanks to a boom in development that started around 2005.

This piece in The New York Times today talks about how a small group of mothers cleaned up Washington Square Park in the early 1980s, essentially paving the way for making downtown the grown up playground that it is now. If you live in one of the many overpriced units downtown, you can thank them. :-)

New York Times Piece About Getting A Real Estate License

I was amused this morning to find this piece on The New York Times web site about all the people getting real estate licenses in New York City in this economic downturn. What people don't realize though, is that just because a you pass the test and maybe someone offers you a desk in their firm, that doesn't mean the money will start falling into your lap. There are many nuances to the business that the licensing course doesn't even get into, especially in New York City. Most important: How well do you work with people? Can you handle difficult personalities? Flakes? People who will run around with four different brokers at once, and sometimes waste your time?

One thing that the media overlooks a lot is that not all real estate transactions are sales. The bulk of my income comes from rentals, and in New York City there is a huge and lucrative rental market. Commissions are not as small as people think. A typical rental commission, after the split with your company, is about $1500. I've has them as high as $3000. And you do several deals a month, both large and small.

Real estate takes a very thick skin and a tremendous work ethic. It's not the easy pot of gold that a lot of people seem to think it is. In the suburbs it may be a lazy housewife's hobby, but in New York City it's a full throttle job. Personally, I love the biz, but I'm scrappy, as it is.


The Optimist's Club

NYT Piece About Renting

The New York Times has a large piece in the real estate section today about what people need to know when they want to rent.

They make some good points, but they also get a little bogged down in rent stabilization, as if that should be a renter's main concern. It shouldn't be. I'll expand on it more later. Renting an apartment is a fairly simple process, but this piece made it sound like a complicated legal transaction. It's not.

In the meantime, you can read the piece here.

"Hope Is Oxygen to Someone Who Is Suffocating On Despair"

Everyone is buzzing about David Carr's memoir excerpt in The New York Times magazine this weekend. It's a great example of what memoir is these days.

After the whole James Frey debacle there's been a lot of attention paid to truth in memoir. How much can you fudge? How much can you rely on your own memory?

I like David Carr's piece because he accepted the fact that his memoir, and one about addiction at that, may have some murky parts, mostly because parts of his memory were shot due to the drugs and booze. So he did what any good journalist does: he went out and reported on it. He tracked down people from his past in order to verify what really went on, or at least get another perspective.

Methinks this is the way that memoirs are going to go from now on. Publishers have to be wary about the veracity of memoirs, because any un-truthiness ultimately hurts the bottom line. If a writer really believes in their story and feels a need to tell it, I think they will go the route of David Carr and report the heck out it.

I can't wait for the book to come out on Tuesday!

Told Ya So! Some Employers Actually Want Blogging Skills

If The New York Times says it, it must be true. It seems that having blogging skills and even the slightest grasp of all this new media stuff can be a plus if you're looking for a job.