It’s been a long road for Brooklyn Heights’ old Franklin Trust office building at 166 Montague Street, which was converted to residential apartments four years ago.

Sales of luxury condominiums in the landmarked 24-unit building, priced at an average of $1,000 a square foot, began in May of 2007. But with the economic crisis in full swing, sales were slow, and the boutique condo went rental this summer.

Now, Halstead Property is hoping to breathe new life into the project. Halstead’s Richard Hamilton, Richard Ingenito and Laura Amin are now marketing 166 Montague, taking over for Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Gregory Williamson. [more]

Andrew Barrocas

From the May issue: While the real estate community is inundated with statistics about sales activity and prices when it comes to the condo and co-op market, there’s one stat that’s rarely bandied about in public: commission fluctuations. In this month’s Q & A, The Real Deal talked to brokers and firm principals about how take-home pay and commissions have changed since the market went into freefall in September 2008. For more on the new types of commission splits that some firms are using and on new development versus resale commissions, we turn to our panel of experts. [more]

From the April issue: B.C. (or Before the real estate Crash), it was axiomatic that you could sell a home for more than you paid for it in New York City.But that truism seems shaky these days, especially for boom-time buyers. In fact, a high number of sellers are losing money on homes purchased during the defining years from 2005 to 2008, according to data from PropertyShark. “What we are seeing a lot is that people are willing to make deals where they lose money,” said Nathaniel Faust, a broker with Citi Habitats, who has seen sellers not only sacrificing all their equity in a property, but having to show up at closings with checkbooks in hand to cover some of the outstanding mortgage debt.

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]

Is the real estate downturn over already? Some brokers are suggesting exactly that — for New York City at least. Brokers
are reporting that contract signings and closings are picking up, in a
decided change from this past winter’s near total lack of activity.
While that market is nowhere near the stratospheric highs of 2007 and
2008, some are predicting that the worst of the downturn has passed. “I
think we bottomed out a few months back, maybe January or February,”
said Richard Hamilton, a senior vice president at Halstead Property,
who said he recently closed on a one-bedroom with a terrace for
$515,000, as well as a 1,600-square-foot apartment in Prospect Heights
– with competing bids — for $800,000. [more]