From the April issue: Residential real estate broker Elaine Clayman has noticed a change in her buyers lately. With prices falling for the past year, buyers had seemed entirely focused on one thing: cost. How much they actually liked the apartment was less important than getting a great deal. “Liking it was not part of the equation for a while,” said Clayman, a managing director at Brown Harris Stevens. “I felt like I was selling commercial real estate.” But in the last few weeks, she’s noticed a shift in her buyers. Suddenly, they seem willing to pay slightly more for an apartment they love. [more]

Jessica Cohen of Prudential Douglas Elliman

From the January issue: When Core’s Kirk Rundhaug started marketing 32 Clinton Street, a four-unit boutique condo in a far-flung corner of the Lower East Side, he was somewhat surprised at who showed up at his open houses. In addition to the young hipsters generally associated with the edgy neighborhood, Rundhaug fielded inquiries from empty nesters from the suburbs of New Jersey and Connecticut. “They were Lower East Side people when they lived in New York,” he said of one 60-something Westchester couple who are eyeing a two-bedroom unit. “They want to come back.” Manhattan’s population of people aged 65 and older is expected to surge nearly 60 percent by 2030 as the baby boom generation ages. And while boomers had largely disappeared from the city’s real estate market in the wake of the financial crisis, brokers say this all-important demographic is now becoming active again. With prices no longer in free fall, many of the city’s boomers are now putting their sprawling apartments and townhouses on the market as they look to downsize to one- and two-bedroom homes. Meanwhile, suburban empty nesters are also reentering the market with an eye toward eventually retiring in the city, exchanging large, labor-intensive houses for apartments rich in services. [more]

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.