From left: Greg Taubin, executive managing director at tenant-side brokerage Studley, Bruce Mosler, chairman of global brokerage at Cushman & Wakefield, David Falk, president of the tri-state region for Newmark Grubb Knight Frank, Eric Ashman, CFO for Thrillist Media Group and Jacqueline Weiss, a partner with the real estate group of law firm Arent Fox

Technology and creative firms which have been driving the Manhattan office leasing market this year are inking deals that are shorter and that utilize space more efficiently than the typical financial firm deal, brokers speaking on a panel this morning said. The companies are negotiating deals that are shorter than the industry standard of 10 years, and the firms average about 120 square feet to 130 square feet per person versus the industry standard of 200 square feet to 250 square feet per person, the panelists said. [more]

From left: Dottie Herman of Elliman, appraiser Jonathan Miller, Pamela Liebman, CEO of the Corcoran Group and Gregory Heym of Terra Holdings

Despite some major high-end deals closing last month, Manhattan’s luxury residential market, which has been strong since the third quarter of 2010, may soon lose its reputation as the most talked about sector in the real estate industry, according to Jonathan Miller, president of appraisal firm Miller Samuel. [more]

A recently released interactive Manhattan apartment sales map by PropertyShark.com (see map below) shows sales data for individual buildings across the city in the third quarter of 2011. Clicking on a point of interest will open a mini-report with a photo of the building and details on individual unit transactions in the building. – Katherine Clarke

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Source: MNS

This month marks the three-year anniversary of the Lehman Brother’s collapse, September monthly rental reports for Manhattan and Brooklyn, released today by MNS, note. Rents in neighborhoods such as Tribeca, Soho and Greenwich Village have fared best during the recovery, mostly maintaining their values, the report shows, increasing by around 13 percent from 2008.

As for month-over-month increases, the report indicates a small degree of positive growth.

“As predicted, this September brought nominal growth in average rental prices compared to August, but the rental market in both Manhattan and Brooklyn continues to be strong,” said Andrew Barrocas, CEO of MNS.

Rents increased 1.3 percent for Manhattan one-bedrooms on a month-over-month basis, 1.6 percent for two-bedrooms, but decreased by 2.7 percent for studios. Prices are up in Manhattan 0.8 percent overall compared to August, with 0.2 percent in non-doorman units and a slight decrease of 0.04 percent in doorman properties. – Katherine Clarke [more]

Clockwise from top left: World Trade Center site, Port Authority Bus Terminal, South Street Seaport, Hudson
Yards, World Financial Center and Farley Post Office/Moynihan Station

From the September issue: “Mall” has been a four-letter word in the Manhattan retail world for some time now. Despite that, Manhattan property owners have begun to — or are planning to — rehab and build a historic amount of large-scale retail over the next few years.
Currently, developers such as the Westfield Group, Brookfield Properties, the Related Companies and Vornado Realty Trust have more than 2.5 million square feet of retail space under construction, or at least on the drawing board, in mall-like projects south of 59th Street.
If all of what’s planned gets built, it would be the greatest amount of large-scale retail space ever delivered in Manhattan during a five- or six-year period, a review of prior development by The Real Deal shows.

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The total dollar amount of Manhattan assets classified as distressed has halved since 2008, Crain’s reported, a sign that the market is rebounding at a healthy pace.
Three years ago, $30.6 billion of assets in Manhattan was in foreclosure, bankruptcy or in the process of having its loans modified. The figure has dropped to $15.2 billion, and 30 percent of that dollar amount is tied to apartment complex Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village.
“This happened faster than we would have imagined,” said Dan Fasulo, managing director of Real Capital Analytics.
The drop in distressed properties can be attributed to an accumulation of single transactions, Crain’s said, and bigger landlords buying up distressed loans. Vornado Realty Trust, for example, bought up three of the eight large distressed assets sold in the first half of 2011, including a stake in 280 Park Avenue.  [more]

Best-performing cities, from left: Hong Kong, St. Petersburg and Paris

Turns out the rich aren’t completely immune to a world that seems on the brink of economic disaster. Sure, luxury real estate prices in “prime global cities” continue to grow even as much of the rest of the world is underwater, but in the second quarter of 2011, that growth slowed. Prices rose just 7 percent year-over-year for the priciest real estate in the most coveted cities, which pales in comparison to the 14 percent growth experienced in 2010, according to data by Knight Frank cited by Business Insider.

More recently, quarter-over-quarter data shows further stagnation. [more]

Noah Rosenblatt, founder of UrbanDigs

UrbanDigs.com is about a month away from launching a real-time Manhattan residential market analytics platform, a data service that reports market trends and figures.
Noah Rosenblatt, founder of brokerage and real estate research Web site UrbanDigs, said that the analytics program will run through a partnership with real estate database service RealPlus, and will feature a suite of user-friendly analytical tools. The program will be free, with an option to pay an approximately $15-per-month subscription fee for additional features.
Rosenblatt said that “the desire for more transparency” motivated him to pursue the analytics platform. While he wouldn’t say what specific market indicators will be analyzed until the platform goes live in the first week of May, he said that the platform will look at “every metric worth following in this market.” [more]

A Prudential Douglas Elliman report released today depicts the spectacular rise of home prices over the past decade, but also the sudden — and definitive — arrival of the real estate slump in Manhattan. In 2009, Manhattan co-ops and condos saw year-over-year declines for the first time since 1996, the report shows. The average 2009 apartment sold for $1.39 million, down 12.5 percent from the previous year. The median price dropped 11 percent to $850,000 from 2008, while the average price per square foot sank 14.2 percent to $1,073. Other areas of the country have seen real estate activity and prices decline gradually over the past few years, but the Manhattan real estate market was still booming until the Lehman Brothers collapse in the fall of 2008. In fact, Manhattan prices set new records in 2008. That year, the average sale price of a Manhattan apartment reached a new ever high of $1.59 million, while the median was $955,000 and the price per square foot was $1,251, according to the report. Still, Manhattan real estate prices remain at dizzying heights compared to a decade ago. More

Source: Prudential Douglas Elliman

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Sales summary for the last 12 months. Click chart for larger version. (source: Yale Robbins)

The Manhattan condo sales market showed a steady monthly and year-over-year decline, according to data compiled by Yale Robbins, a real estate publisher and database resource. The number of sales in November 2009, the most recent month for which the data was available, hit 371, down 9 percent from the previous month’s sales total, and down 10 percent year-over-year, according to Yale Robbins’ Condo Sales Report. The Manhattan condo report, which was compiled using the company’s database of approximately 3,300 condos and co-ops, showed that the average sales price of Manhattan condos in November was $1.49 million, down 18 percent from the month before when the average price hit $1.81 million, and down 11 percent from November 2008, when the average sales price was at $1.67 million, according to the report. Also looking at the sales data, the Real Estate Board of New York’s report, released this week, which included quarterly, not monthly data, put the average sales price of Manhattan condos in the fourth quarter at $1.67 million. TRD