From left: Kathy Braddock and Paul Purcell of Charles Rutenberg Realty, and Jonas Lee, who has founded several internet startups, have launched TopAgentGuide.com

Ask any Manhattan resident how to go about finding the right real estate agent, and you’ll likely get a flood of horror stories about high-pressure sales and terrible apartments.

A new Web site is trying to change that.

TopAgentGuide.com, newly launched by the founders of real estate consultancy Braddock + Purcell, aims to function as a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal for real estate, by prescreening agents and pointing users to the best ones.

“We’ve got thousands of agents in New York, but there’s really no way to find the best one,” said Kathy Braddock, executive consultant at TopAgentGuide.com. “Hopefully the site will make the consumer more aware of the fabulous agents out there.”

But Braddock has even loftier aspirations for the venture. [more]

With the glut of housing data and statistics available, it’s difficult to know which figures give the most accurate representation of home sales and prices. In Manhattan, the disparity between national housing figures, such as average home price and sales, and city numbers can be particularly noticeable. Rather than one national market, there are, in reality, many mini-markets to evaluate, according to broker Douglas Heddings, president of the Manhattan-based Heddings Property Group at Charles Rutenberg Realty. Heddings told Fox Business News that it’s unwise for both homebuyers and mortgage lenders to rely on monthly national data to determine housing trends. The data “can be incredibly confusing to the buying and selling public,” Heddings said. “The lenders looking at all of the [markets] exactly the same is a negative but it is, in fact, the case.”

As tax abatements on condo and co-op purchases dwindle, more New Yorkers are finding that the cheap monthly payments they were expecting aren’t a reality — for long. Douglas Heddings, a former senior vice president with Prudential Douglas Elliman and founder of the Heddings Property Group, told New York magazine that his client was wowed by an Upper West Side two-bedroom apartment, which had monthly taxes of just $600, thanks to a tax abatement. But this low fee won’t last long; once the tax abatement runs out in 2014, the fee will be $1,550 per month. While not exactly a bait and switch, this could be a nasty surprise for buyers who accept higher maintenance charges, for example, with the expectation that their taxes will remain low indefinitely. Nan Shipley, president of Rand Realty, said that reduced taxes incentivize buyers to purchase a pricier home, often with negative consequences. Many buyers will shop out of their price range because of these incentives, Shipley said, without considering the long-term costs.

Blogger Noah Rosenblatt leaves Halstead Property (Animation by Derek Zahedi)

Well-known blogger Noah Rosenblatt has left his post as an associate
broker at Halstead Property to focus more attention on his popular real
estate analysis Web site, UrbanDigs.com, and launch a new consulting
business. Rosenblatt will continue to work as a real estate agent for now, but
his license is now being held by the newly founded company associated
with his Web site, UrbanDigs Analytics and Consulting. Over the next six to eight months, Rosenblatt and his partner, Jeff
Bernstein, will also redesign the Web site “to make it more social and
interactive,” and add a suite of analytical tools to help buyers and
sellers assess the state of the real estate market, Rosenblatt said. [more]

TrueGotham.com founder Douglas Heddings is departing Prudential Douglas
Elliman, saying the move will allow him greater autonomy for his popular
real estate blog. Heddings, formerly a senior vice president at Elliman, has moved to
relatively new Charles Rutenberg Realty in New York with his four-agent team, the
Heddings Property Group. Heddings, who was named one of the 25 Most Influential Real Estate Bloggers in 2007 by Inman News,
said while Elliman was supportive of his blog — which sometimes
reveals unsavory behavior by brokers or grim predictions about the
economy — there were times when the firm asked him to remove certain
posts. [more]

From the May issue: When Groucho Marx said he didn’t want to belong to
any club that would have him as a member, he was actually making a
serious psychological point — being denied admittance to something can
build interest in it. For many real estate brokers, a similar mentality
applies to open houses, especially in a challenging market where a
full-court press is required for nearly every sale and, even, rental.
If apartment hunters enter a unit to find it chock-full of other
buyers, the thinking goes, their level of intrigue will rise. [more]