From the April issue: Christopher Burdzy had walked his clients through almost all of a bank-owned single-family home in Staten Island when they decided to peek inside the basement garage. “This is a bad house! Do not buy it!” read black spray paint on the walls. “That was kind of spooky,” recalled Burdzy, a broker with Staten Island-based Leader Properties, though he wasn’t shocked. Borrowers facing foreclosure will often go to great lengths to prevent new buyers from snatching up their homes, in the hopes that they can buy them back once they hit the market at a discounted price, he said, and he suspects that’s what happened there. [more]

Sam Heskel, founder of HMS Associates, who predicts a rise in foreclosures on high-end apartments

From the December issue: While green shoots may have sprouted in some sectors of the New York City residential market, there are plenty of other areas where that is far from the case. Foreclosures continue to ravage neighborhoods throughout the outer boroughs — most notably southern Queens and parts of Brooklyn — and more distress is quietly creeping into the Manhattan residential market. In this month’s Q & A, appraisers, analysts and brokers who follow foreclosures told The Real Deal that while certain areas of the city are starting to level off when it comes to foreclosures, in others it’s difficult to even find a “regular” nondistressed sale. One expert from New York University’s Furman Center said that the third quarter of 2009 saw 6,000 foreclosure filings in the city — the largest number since the research center started tracking quarterly data in the early 1990s. And worrisome trends are on the horizon.