From left: Andrew Peretz, Barry Ritholtz, Eric Anton and Lawrence Yun

Many make a profession of foreseeing the future: meteorologists and fortune-tellers, among others. But there are few harder industries to predict than real estate, even for market experts. And after 2009′s battering, few ventured a guess on 2010′s outcome. As The Real Deal‘s Editor-in-Chief Stuart Elliott noted in January 2010, “if we were to turn a corner, we wouldn’t know it until we did.” But, as we did last year, The Real Deal has looked at the most noteworthy predictions of the year to determine just how right — or wrong — those forecasts were. [more]

From the November issue: While prices and sales activity have picked up in New York in the last couple of months, a number of analysts are predicting a second round to the downturn here, with prices likely to fall. Estimates range from a drop of a few percentage points to up to 17 percent. Barry Ritholtz, the New York-based CEO and director of equity research at Fusion IQ, an online quantitative research firm, noted that “there’s still some downside to prices” in New York. “The good news is, the worst of the bloodbath is probably behind us in terms of falling prices,” he said. “The bad news is, unemployment continues to tick up and foreclosures continue to ramp up. I do not think New York is at a bottom quite yet.” Financial analysis firm Fiserv predicted last month that the New York City metro area will underperform the nation as a whole over the next two years, with prices falling another 17.4 percent by June 2011.

From the September issue: For a year now, real estate brokers and developers in New York have
been grappling with the ripple effect of the Lehman Brothers collapse
and the Wall Street fallout. But now, on this somewhat somber
anniversary, it’s time to start looking ahead and anticipating where
the market will be a year from now.
In this month’s Q & A, The Real Deal talked to
economists, brokers and firm principals who described what the
landscape will look like for sales activity, pricing, foreclosures and
employment in the next 12 months in the city. The predictions were not
all pretty.
Indeed, one economist said that prices will have dropped another 13 percent by next September. more