From the August issue: When temperatures rise in New York City, apartment buyers skip town — or so goes the conventional wisdom. That leads many sellers to believe that they are better off waiting for the fall to list new properties. But this summer, it’s not so clear-cut. Today’s market is more unpredictable than ever. As a result, more brokers are choosing to list properties in August rather than face the unknown in the fall. This month, The Real Deal asked industry experts to weigh in on the pros and cons of listing a new property during the dog days of summer. Here’s what they had to say: [more]

Small details which affect the appearance of an apartment can change the ultimate sales price by 5 to 10 percent, brokers told the New York Times. While chipped plaster or broken bathroom tiles can knock $500 to $5,000 off an offer, $1,500 floating walls can add $50,000 to $70,000, and a $10,000 paint job easily adds $50,000 to the price, according to an informal survey of New York City brokers. According to Douglas Heddings, founder of Heddings Property Group, cluttered apartments can linger longer on the market and sell for less. [more]

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]

Douglas Heddings of the Heddings Property Group at Charles Rutenberg Realty; Tamir Shemesh at Prudential Douglas Elliman; Michael Signet at Bond New York Real Estate; Fabienne Lecole at the Corcoran Group; Leigh Zaph at Manhattan Homes; Shebrelle Hunter-Green at the Corcoran Group; and Rena Goldstein at Halstead Property

The Real Deal asked a number of residential real estate agents what the strangest thing is that they’ve seen at an open house. The responses ran the gamut from breast feeding to naked people to a dog taking a house tour. Here is a sampling of what the agents have encountered:

Douglas Heddings, associate broker and founder of the Heddings Property Group at Charles Rutenberg Realty: How about a five-year old breast feeding? Here are some less shocking examples: A drying rack full of panties in a living room, a toilet seat that was taped closed so that open house attendees could not use the facilities, of course the [Upper West Side] robbery [of an open house Heddings was hosting] that was highly publicized and a spray painted wall saying “monkey nipple” on a teenager’s bedroom wall, which the seller refused to remove. Click here for more. Compiled by Lauren Elkies
[more]

From the December issue: In New York City real estate, buyers have had the upper hand for a
while. With transactions virtually frozen in the wake of last year’s
collapse of Lehman Brothers, sellers grew alarmed, dropping prices and
offering incentives to tempt purchasers. For the first time in a year, however, New York is no longer a
buyer’s market, brokers say. Or at least not the intense buyer’s market
of recent months.
“Neither buyers nor sellers have an obvious upper hand over each
other right now,” said Ric Swezey, a senior associate at the Corcoran
Group.
As the stock market recovered and prices dropped, more buyers –
especially those who put off buying during the financial crisis — came
back into the market, searching for bargain prices. [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.”

From the October issue: While brokers know they’ve got to work all their sources to keep
business flowing, in this down market, leads from their managers are
more coveted than ever. While the practice of managers “feeding” certain brokers potential
buyers or sellers can lead to behind-the-scenes sniping between agents,
it’s a reality of the business. In a down market, fed leads are less likely to go to inexperienced
brokers, or those with few connections, because management typically
doles them out to top producers, sources said. “A new agent is unlikely to get fed high-quality leads,” said Noah
Rosenblatt, founder of the firm Urban Digs. “Usually, management feeds
leads to the most productive agents, because then you don’t have to
worry about a young agent not bringing the sale in.”