It's been a crazy week. I've been out and about with clients, I have a lease signing tomorrow as well as lunch with an old friend from Connecticut. I also have another client who just moved here from Italy who is living in hotels because a co-op board refuses to get back to us about the state of her application. She's being a good sport thus far, but everyone involved -- including myself, the client and the apartment's owner is stressed out. Even my accounting department is confused, because they don't know what to do with all the money she wired over for rent, fees, etc.

It's all made me a little tense, and when I get tense, I start having opinions. Hence, a new post on the Huffington Post about competitive motherhood in Manhattan.

I've seen a lot of apartments this week, from $1400 studios in the East Village to $4000 one bedrooms on the Upper East Side with 36th floor views that could melt your face off.

One apartment that I took two client to was huge, furnished -- and smelled musty. This was strange, since it was in a new building with a fancy marble lobby and a gym. The owner outfitted it with 1970s era wooden furniture and the place stunk. The listing agent later e-mailed me for feedback, which is always a dangerous thing, especially when I am juggling many clients and an Italian ex-pat who's holed up at overpriced hotels and losing patience with a co-op board.

And so it goes:
"The furnished client didn't like the furnishings and the non-furnished client wasn't thrilled with the green walls or the outdated kitchen, which is a shame. The space is amazing. Also: owner may want to consider taking some of the older furniture out, since it smells like mothballs in there. Not sure if you were aware.

But the building is awesome as is the unit. It just needs to be an ounce more modern. Those afghans really turned off the furnished client."

Seriously, afghans? If you're ever trying to rent a furnished unit, don't add knick-knacks like afghans and Precious Moments figurines. Furnished clients are looking for basic pieces -- a nice couch, TV, dining table, etc. They don't need the window dressings.

The bottom line is that if over the next few days you ask my honest opinion about something, chances are you're going to get it. And it's going to be really honest, reflecting the ball of sunshine that I am right now. Buyer beware.

Wall Street Journal Rental Market Article Fail

Oh look, an article about the housing market that makes no sense at all. Quelle surprise.

An excellent example of some shabby reporting is this Wall Street Journal piece. He's talking about the the glut of rental apartments nationwide. The key word here is nationwide. Yeah, there are parts of the country that have been hit badly by the recession and areas where there isn't a huge rental market have a lot of inventory. No shock there. This strikes me as being a clear example of supply and demand.

It's clear this writer wants to make some connection to Manhattan, but instead of giving us actual numbers about the vacancy rates, he finds some lame quote from a recent renter. Nothing from a broker, a brokerage firm or even an analyst, and analysts are always more than happy to speak to the press. New York City, by the way, doesn't even show up on the list of cities with the most concessions to renters. And generally speaking, offering a free month of rent isn't much of a pain to a landlord. Very few landlords are operating on fumes. The concessions are offered just to make sure their units get rented so that their cash flow continues. Quite a few Manhattan landlords use their rentals properties as cash sources for larger development and investment projects.

The New York City rental market is still nice and tight, at least in the prime neighborhoods. You'll notice that his quote from the token renter doesn't mention where she rented. Was it the West Village? The Upper East Side? These are two completely different markets.

Back in September I spent over a week trying to find a $3000 one bedroom in Chelsea for a client, which is a pretty common price point in the neighborhood, and we had maybe six to choose from. Where was the glut of inventory that the press likes to make so much noise about?

The majority of the WSJ piece just rehashes a bunch of housing info that even the most leisurely follower of the news would already know, but it doesn't tell the New York reader much about their city. Which one would expect, considering it is The Wall Street Journal.

One thing to keep in mind when reading any kind of journalism, especially financial journalism -- and this is coming from someone who worked in the biz for eight years -- is that very few journalists have ever actually worked in the field that they cover. Veteran or even plucky writers obviously become quite good at what they do, but in this economy, where reporters are getting laid off in high numbers through no fault of their own, their next gig may likely have nothing to do with what they were doing before.

One large area of growth for journalists is financial journalism. Financial web sites are becoming a cottage industry, and their quality varies. A novice business reporter starts out by churning out pieces about earnings reports and economic indicators, (such as the piece in question) and eventually expands to larger think pieces. But if you put a gun to their heads and asked them to explain a credit default swap or a few basic mathematical models, they couldn't do that. Is that problematic? Perhaps.

Which isn't to say that I, personally, am suspicious of all business news. Back when I was hanging around Old Greenwich, I took a 7:29 train into Manhattan in the morning with quite a few people in decision making positions. They all read the FT, which got me into reading the FT, which is why I still have a subscription.

AM New York Fails At Real Estate Article. No Shock There.

I'm in AM New York, originally uploaded by MariSheibley.

AM New York had a cover story on Thursday about how New York homes sales were sinking 20%, and possibly even more. These kinds of stories irritate me and inevitably make my life more difficult, since I work in real estate. These journalists have little idea what they’re talking about, and they churn out these pieces to sell papers and cause people to make unrealistic expectations when they look for an apartment, either to buy or to rent.

As someone who works in the industry, I can a few things with certainty:

1. First of all, few sellers ever gets their asking price. There are always negotiations, for a lot of reasons, especially in New York. People will haggle for days over the price, and even incidentals like who’s paying the flip tax on a co-op. If you’re selling a studio for $500,000, maybe you’ll get $450,000 - $480,000, depending on a lot of factors.

2. The quotes he uses aren’t really from reputable real estate professionals. Instead, they’re random people off the street yammering on about the economy or how they want to buy a place because the market seems good. Great, I hear that at cocktail parties all the time yet few people actually speak to a mortgage broker and then actually look. It’s filler and it adds nothing of value to the story and speaks volumes about this writer’s skills. It’s telling that no one from Halstead or Corcoran would comment, mostly because the basis of the whole story is bonk.

3. Yes, there are more listings these days, and many people are renting their units instead of selling them because it is harder to get financing than it was last year. Banks have stopped handing out money to anyone with a pen and an application. They did that before and look where it got us. People who are qualified will get financing, the way it should be. The people who can’t get easy credit will be calling me about renting a one bedroom.

4. And no, behind the scenes brokers aren’t saying scarier numbers, like 30 or 40 per cent lower. I’m a broker, and I sit in an office full of brokers, many of which have properties in contract right now. Some were on the market for less than a month. Some are over $1 million. And the rental market? Robust. I’m not saying the whole industry is rosy, because it’s taken a hit just like anyplace else, but it still chugs along. People have to live somewhere.


You have to understand how journalism works, especially these days. Writers are handed a press release or whatever it is, and they have to churn out a piece under a very tight deadline. There’s an old newsroom saying, “Go With What Ya Got,” which is very much true in this Internet age. Also, and this is often true with business reporters, many have no formal training in business or finance. Many reporters take the job because it pays. AM New York, incidentally, does not pay well. None of the free rags do. Consider that before you take their hackneyed real estate advice.

That said, do yourself an enormous favor and don’t take business advice, especially real estate advice, from anything you read in the media, especially AM New York. Pick up the phone and call someone who actually works in the industry. Go to the source, not the middle man.

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.