Paula Busch, a veteran senior-level manager in the Corcoran Group’s flagship 660 Madison Avenue office, has left the firm for Town Residential, the latest in a string of recruits to Andrew Heiberger’s new brokerage. According to Town, Busch will take over as managing director of sales. Busch, who had overseen 350 agents in her role at Corcoran, said in a statement that she is “thrilled to be joining a company as innovative and entrepreneurial as Town,” while Heiberger praised her as a “pillar of the industry.” TRD [more]

Ric Swezey, a former agent with the Corcoran Group, announced his move to Town residential today, a relatively new residential brokerage and brainchild of Citi Habitats founder Andrew Heiberger. Swezey, who once ranked fourth out of all Corcoran agents, is bringing his team with him. The former professional gymnast will start with Town as a senior vice president. Swezey joins several new agents at Town in recent months, including Wendy Maitland, who left Brown Harris Stevens for Town last December, and Robert Dvorin, who left Elliman for Town earlier this month. TRD

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]

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 the October issue: Zhann Jochinke, an associate broker at Argo Residential, put an alcove
studio on the market last year for $525,000. But the offers that came
in were as low as $390,000. “People were putting bids out there just to
see if the person had to sell,” he recalled. More recently, however, he
convinced the seller to drop the price to around $490,000. Offers began
coming in at “5 percent or less off the asking price,” he
said. Now, the listing is in contract, and expected to close in the
next month. After months of uncertainty, Manhattan buyers and sellers
are finally
making a market.