6 Wyckham Hill Lane and Robert Bland of Sotheby’s International Realty

The owners of a Greenwich, Conn. home on the market for $4.9 million are offering a $100,000 bonus to the broker that successfully finds a buyer for the home, on top of the area’s typical 5 percent commission. The New York Times reported the owners of 6 Wyckham Hill Lane sent out an email blast to notify local agents of the bonus about two weeks ago and set Thanksgiving as the day the deal expires.

The home is listed by Robert Bland, the manager of Sotheby’s International Realty’s Greenwich office, who said it is meant to drum up interest and focus it over a short period for a home that’s been on the market for more than a year. [more]

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his plans to pour another $1 billion into an affordable housing build-up effort during a talk at the New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. Meanwhile, Devonshire House, the pre-war-turned-condo building at 28 East 10th Street, will be the site of a cooking event with Food Network chef and star Alexandra Guarnaschelli, and buyers’ brokerage Elika Associates announced a new partnership today with alchemyRED, a real estate developer and renovation liaison service for homeowners, and Cross It Off Your List, a so-called “relocation and lifestyle management company.” Click here for more. TRD
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From the January issue: For some buyers’ brokers, it’s their greatest fear come to pass. More and more apartment hunters, armed with listing information gleaned from the Web, are representing themselves rather than using a real estate agent. “I have buyers coming at me [at open houses], unrepresented, clutching fistfuls of paper,” said Halstead Property senior vice president Charles Homet, who primarily works with sellers. “They pride themselves on their Internet acumen and they feel they have enough information.” This is the long-feared bogeyman of the Internet era for buyers’ brokers: the idea that buyers will no longer need them because they can find listings online and deal directly with the seller’s agent.And while buyers’ brokers clearly have an advantage right now in the soft market, the long term is a different story. In some ways, the changes are already afoot. Prudential Douglas Elliman vice chairman Dolly Lenz said she is doing “a lot more direct deals,” estimating that she may be working with twice as many unrepresented buyers now as in past years.

From left to right: Justin Elghanayan, Jed Walentas, Andrew Sciame, Samantha Rudin, Raphael De Niro and Benjamin Levine

From the January issue: Signs of improvement appeared at the end of the year, but 2009 will be remembered for its epic real estate downturn. In response to the maelstrom of hard times, many longtime industry veterans took the opportunity to scale back their activities rather than tackling what promise to be several more difficult years. For example, Brown Harris Stevens announced plans to take over the 28-year-old Upper East Side boutique firm started by Edward Lee Cave, a fixture of the high-end brokerage scene. And Douglas Durst stepped down as co-president of the Durst Organization, after describing his day-to-day duties as “exhausting.” (He’ll remain chairman). But as some industry leaders recede, new opportunities are being created for young players, new ideas, new buyers and innovative business models. This month, The Real Deal looked at the next generation of New York City real estate, from the people poised to reshape the industry to the strategies that will help them do it. We looked at how the offspring of some of the city’s most established real estate families — including Ivanka Trump, Jed Walentas, Justin Elghanayan and Jamie and Harrison LeFrak — are handling the downturn. Because many old real estate families were conservative during the boom and avoided overleveraging, observers say their sons and daughters are uniquely positioned to profit from distressed opportunities.  More

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Streeteasy.com Web site

In the traditionally enigmatic world of New York real estate, some
facets of even the most closely-held deals have become tough to hide.
Basic information — buyer, seller, price, address — is searchable on
the Web once it closes and becomes public record. And the selling agent
is easy enough to find between advertisements that prominently feature
their names and real estate listings Web sites like Streeteasy.com,
which, since 2005, has been matching those listings with records from
the city’s Department of Finance. But there are two sides to almost
every sale, and despite the past decade’s move toward transparency,
information on buyers’ brokers remains more elusive. Streeteasy.com hopes that changes, said Derrick Gross, a business
analyst at the company. StreetEasy rolled out a group of new features
last Friday — among them, the ability for buyers’ brokers to claim
recent deals as their own. [more]

From the November issue: In Manhattan, buyers’ brokers are a secretive bunch. When there’s a
high-profile sale, the listing agent’s name is splashed across the
headlines: Brown Harris Stevens’ Richard Wallgren, for example, closed
the sale of a $37 million penthouse at 15 Central Park West in
September; Paula Del Nunzio made news for her record-setting $53
million sale of the Harkness mansion in 2006. Less well-known are the
brokers who represented the buyers. The identities of buyers’ brokers
are a jealously guarded secret, never listed in public records and
often never revealed. That’s the way many brokers — who pride
themselves on their discretion — like it, especially in a market where
lavish spending is viewed with disfavor. Ironically, brokers who
represent buyers are taking on a greater significance than ever, even
as they’re being asked to keep increasingly quiet about their role.
Well-qualified buyers are now scarce, and bringing them to the table is
crucial to the transaction. Recognizing this, high-end brokers are
spending more of their time representing buyers.

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