Bill Staniford, CEO of PropertyShark, has left the company, following its acquisition by California-based real estate software company Yardi Systems six months ago, according to Crain’s. Staniford, who has been with PropertyShark since 2008, said that, after the acquisition, “the company wasn’t a good fit” for him. The former CEO cited a changing company culture as his reason for leaving. “I don’t perform well in larger entities,” Staniford said. “I’m used to calling the shots.” Staniford grabbed headlines recently, when he revealed his romantic involvement with Anna Chapman, a Russian spy. [Crain's]

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While many would contend that working in real estate data tracking is neither thrilling nor sexy, PropertyShark CEO Bill Staniford got his own brush with the illicit world of intelligence operatives as one of Russian spy Anna Chapman’s many romantic partners, according to the New York Post. Staniford, a former Marine, said Chapman “knocked [him] out” as soon as they met, before embarking on an intimate relationship. But while Staniford, the cousin of former City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, and Chapman may have been romantically linked, the real estate data guru said he never shared any info from his days as a Marine. “I know what I’m allowed to say, and I know what I’m not allowed to say,” Staniford said. [Post]

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A double-dip will strike the New York City housing market in four to eight months, according to Bill Staniford, general manager of real estate research website Property Shark [more]

From the April issue: B.C. (or Before the real estate Crash), it was axiomatic that you could sell a home for more than you paid for it in New York City.But that truism seems shaky these days, especially for boom-time buyers. In fact, a high number of sellers are losing money on homes purchased during the defining years from 2005 to 2008, according to data from PropertyShark. “What we are seeing a lot is that people are willing to make deals where they lose money,” said Nathaniel Faust, a broker with Citi Habitats, who has seen sellers not only sacrificing all their equity in a property, but having to show up at closings with checkbooks in hand to cover some of the outstanding mortgage debt.

During the boom, New Yorkers increasingly relied on “price-per-square-foot” as a way to compare rapidly rising apartment values.
The metric is even more popular in the downturn, as discount-crazed buyers look for good deals.
But price-per-square-foot isn’t as reliable a measure as they think. Unbeknownst to many shoppers, it’s extremely difficult to determine the true square footage of a Manhattan property, experts say.
“When it comes to square footage in New York City, it’s the Wild West,” Bill Staniford, the CEO of real estate data Web site PropertyShark. “It’s measured in so many different ways.”
And in the current downturn, the difficulty of determining square footage is contributing to a number of other problems, from low appraisals to ruined deals.
Staniford, who constantly fields questions from brokers about inaccurate square footage data on file with the city, said using price-per-square-foot as a measure of value is “totally pointless.”
That puts “every single broker in a very difficult situation, unless they want to break out the measuring tape,” he said.
Even then, they might still be wrong.
It’s fairly easy to determine the square footage of a suburban single-family home: measure the footprint of the house, factor in the number of stories, and you’re done.
Manhattan apartments are a different story. [more]

From the February issue: Major residential brokerages may still snub their noses at the listings, but a growing number of firms, particularly in the outer boroughs, are fighting for a share of the foreclosed homes market. Lenders took back thousands of homes in New York State last year and thousands more face foreclosure this year. Take Staten Island-based Wonica Realtors and Appraisers. Last year, according to founder and president George Wonica, the firm’s REO division, which specializes in marketing and selling foreclosed residential properties in Staten Island and Brooklyn, accounted for almost 80 percent of his firm’s revenue. “It carried the office,” Wonica told The Real Deal. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” The marketplace for REOs — or “Real Estate Owned” by the bank because they did not successfully sell at a foreclosure auction — is thriving in places hit hard by the housing downturn. In New York City that usually means in the outer boroughs, although Manhattan is not impervious.  [more] [more]