The Real Deal had a contingent of reporters and editors at the New York Hilton for the Real Estate Board of New York’s annual banquet and awards ceremony (click here to see an article on the event). The Real Deal’s Web editor Lauren Elkies interviewed a slew of real estate bigwigs from Bill Rudin of Rudin Management — who said Jonathan Mechanic of Fried, Frank (who The Real Deal also spoke to) is “the real deal” — to Bruce Mosler of Cushman & Wakefield — who said he loves The Real Deal, to Frederick Peters of Warburg Realty — who said “Virtual Office Web sites,” or VOWS, “will ultimately be insignificant.” [more]

From left: Jonathan Isaacs and Steve Ganz of Aligned Real Estate

At a time when a bevy of new business models have sprung up to capitalize on the real estate downturn, a residential brokerage launched by two former Core agents has revived the idea of discounted commissions. Steve Ganz, a former Core managing director, and Jonathan Isaacs, a former Core vice president, left the boutique brokerage in December 2009 to launch a new company, Aligned Real Estate. Based at 315 Fifth Avenue at 32nd Street, the new firm has a total of five agents, Isaacs said, though he expects the company to grow. Aligned has dispensed with the 6 percent commission model that real estate brokers historically receive for each sale, the founders said. Instead, they’ve devised a complex fee structure based on factors like the size of the apartment, how long it takes to sell, whether it sells above the asking price, and whether the customer chooses to pay the full commission at closing or in monthly installments. [more]

Century 21 NY Metro is the latest New York City brokerage firm to ramp
up its social media efforts. The firm launched Live Agent Chat last
week, a feature on its Web site which allows potential buyers to chat
online with agents while perusing listings. The system connects potential clients with agents who are logged in at
that time and cycles the next client to the next agent, moving through
those logged in. “With more buyers and renters finding that even e-mail is too slow in
this era of texting and tweeting, an immediate chat response is often
preferred,” said Marc Lewis, president of Century 21 NY Metro. The agents are reporting success with the new feature. “I’ve come close to closing a deal and many of my colleagues have been
successful the first day the chat feature was up and running,” Century
21 NY Metro agent Deborah Abraham told The Real Deal during an online
chat. [more]

From left: Studley’s soiree was in its new offices at 399 Park Avenue; Charles
Rutenberg Realty celebrated the holidays at bowling alley Lucky Strike
Lanes, and Halstead Property held its bash at Guastavino’s at 409 East
59th Street, where Brown Harris Stevens also celebrated the season

In a real estate market that’s been challenging at best, knowing how to celebrate the bounty of the holidays is a tricky thing.

Celebrate too much and you risk looking out of touch with the economic climate. Too little, and your firm could look like it’s struggling.

“Perception is everything,” said Cindy Seidowitz, a senior vice president at Studley. It could seem terribly gauche, for example, “if [people] are canceling parties and scaling back and you’re throwing this lavish bash,” she added.

Most years commercial real estate firm Studley would decamp to a restaurant or club for its annual Christmas party — this year, it stuck to its home base. The firm, which is planning to move into its new 11th-floor office at 399 Park Avenue in the first quarter of 2010, decided to celebrate the holidays and its relocation to the 60,000-square-foot space by holding its annual holiday bash there. [more]

Leigh Zaph is planning on registering his three-person firm, Manhattan Homes, as a Virtual Office Web site.

From the December issue:
A new breed of online brokerage is springing up in New York, altering
the landscape of real estate sales in Manhattan and worrying
traditional firms, who fear the changes may hurt their business. In the past, New York firms have contended with Web aggregators
like StreetEasy and Trulia, which gather and post information on local
brokerage listings. But thanks to a recent settlement between the federal Department of
Justice and the National Association of Realtors, the Real Estate Board
of New York is now sharing all of its members’ listings directly with
online brokerages, known as “Virtual Office Web sites.” These VOWs, as they are called, allow consumers to view those listings — including those from other firms — online. Experts say the change will have far-reaching consequences for the
industry in the coming year and beyond. Some believe VOWs could also
pave the way for a comprehensive Multiple Listing Service, which has
long been resisted here.  More

[more]

James Ferrari, the founder of Benjamin James Real Estate, said he is reinvigorating the ailing company with an injection of capital and a radically altered business plan he claims would give three-quarters of the company’s profits to charity.
A former male model, Ferrari left the 16-year-old company in the hands of top executive Douglas Wagner for the past few years while he focused on other pursuits, like philanthropy, music and his media company, Ferrari Media Production. “I couldn’t have told you two years ago who worked at my company because I was on the West Coast or South Africa,” Ferrari said. With the financial crisis, however, the business struggled, closing two of its three offices within a year, and Wagner recently announced plans to leave, as The Real Deal first reported. Ferrari considered closing the company, he told The Real Deal, but instead has decided to step back in to manage its day-to-day operations. He said he is planning to put a significant amount of capital into the business — “whatever it takes” to get it up and running. He is also planning to reopen the company’s Soho office, which closed over a year ago, and has begun making overdue payments to creditors, (including The Real Deal). “The future of the company is much more stable than it was six months ago,” Ferrari told The Real Deal by phone from the company’s current headquarters at 120 West 21st Street. But there’s one major difference. This time around, Ferrari said, he is committed to transforming the company into a socially conscious venture that will give some 75 percent of its profits — after agents and bills have been paid — to charitable organizations Ferrari supports, such as the AIDS research group amfAR, the non-profit organization Color Me In!, and Housing Works. [more]

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 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]

Jacky Teplitzky of Prudential Douglas Elliman leads a REBNY discussion, “Pricing Property in a Changing Market”

Brokers heatedly discussed the pros and cons of sharing signed contract information at the Real Estate Board of New York’s Lexington Avenue headquarters today. Jacky Teplitzky, a managing director at Prudential Douglas Elliman, who led a discussion titled “Pricing Property in a Changing Market” as part of REBNY’s monthly Breakfast Club series, advocated for the sharing of signed-contract information in the post-Lehman market, where frequent market fluctuations have made accurate pricing nearly impossible. “The market is changing in such a rapid way that the only numbers we can use are contracts signed,” she said. Closed sales data — available months, or in the case of new development, years after a contract is signed — often no longer reflects current market conditions, she said. But other brokers said they don’t feel comfortable disclosing signed contract data for fear it violates their responsibility to sellers, and it could be considered illegal if not handled correctly. [more]

From left: Diane Levine of Sotheby’s International Realty, 168 West 73rd Street, Neil Binder of Bellmarc Realty

While a significant portion of listings — roughly 33 percent,
according to Streeteasy.com — saw price cuts last month, there was an
increase in sales and many brokers started elevating asking prices to
enhance their units’ image, to leave room for haggling or because they
thought the market was turning around. Upwards of 850 homes in Manhattan sold in August, according to figures compiled by The Real Deal
using Streeteasy.com data, up from approximately 760 deals made a month
prior. Almost 5 percent of all Manhattan homes on the market last
month, the data shows, saw price increases; those price changes
averaged 6.4 percent. And those price increases were seen across the price spectrum. [more]