From left: Jonathon Yormak and David Peretz of East End Partners and 256 West 38th Street

Jonathon Yormak of East End Capital Partners is hosting a broker party this afternoon at the company’s recently acquired office property at 256 West 38th Street, the New York Observer reported, and is providing an unusual incentive for real estate pros to attend.

The first 50 brokers to arrive at the event will receive $50 apiece, the Observer said. The company wants to get brokers through the door to draw attention to the so-far “off the radar” property, which currently has 50,000 square feet of vacant space, Yormak explained. [more]

An increasing number of Manhattan neighborhoods are feeling empty, residents said, because of a jump in the number of wealthy out-of-towners buying pieds-à-terre and unused investment properties in the city, the New York Times reported.
Since 2000, Manhattan apartments occupied by absentee owners and renters have increased by more than 70 percent, the Times said, to nearly 34,000, from 19,000.
A large area on the East Side bounded by Fifth and Park Avenues and East 49th and 70th Streets sees about 30 percent of more than 5,000 apartments routinely vacant more than 10 months a year, according to the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey. [more]

Source: Citi Habitats

Average Manhattan residential rents climbed 8.13 percent in January, compared to the same month a year earlier, according to Citi Habitats’ monthly market report. Despite this year-over-year growth, rents stayed relatively flat between December and January. The average rent in the borough climbed 2 percent for studios, 1 percent for one-bedrooms and 2 percent for two-bedroom units. Three-bedroom apartments saw no change in their average rent. Soho/Tribeca topped the list of priciest neighborhoods in the borough, reporting the priciest average rent on all units, except studios. A three-bedroom unit in the neighborhood had an average monthly rent of $8,400. Washington Heights reported the least expensive rents — a studio there has an average rent of $1,105. [more]

Nationwide, office space is filling up in downtown areas, while its counterpart in the suburbs remains vacant. “It’s a reversal of what we’ve been seeing in decades,” the Wall Street Journal’s Anton Troianovski says in the video above.
In the 1990s, the vacancy level was higher downtown than in the suburbs, but now downtown is leading the recovery in the office space market. “The downtown office market has stabilized, while the suburbs have lost about 280 football fields worth of space,” Troianovski said, which may be attributed to companies expanding and looking for more space.
[more]

Manhattan continued to see a decline in its rental vacancy rate last month, according to residential brokerage Citi Habitats’ [more]

Source: Citi Habitats (click image for larger version)

The rental market has improved in all but a handful of Manhattan neighborhoods, acc [more]

Despite a projected 1,160 apartment units set to hit the Brooklyn market in 2010, the vacancy rate in the borough will stay relatively the same, according to the first-quarter market report from Marcus &amp; Millichap. Apartment vacancy is set to hit 2.6 percent in 2010, according to the report, up just 0.2 percent from the current vacancy rate, despite the abundance of inventory that will enter the market. This prediction comes on the heels of improvement, price-wise, among apartments over the last year. The median price increased 8 percent to $117,360 year-over-year. <i>TRD</i> [more]

The
Intercontinental Times Square
is set to open
in July.

From the March issue: Just as New York City’s painful and protracted hotel sector slump finally seems to be hitting bottom, the industry has a new problem on its hands: It’s about to be slammed with a dramatic increase in new hotel rooms.

Research by The Real Deal and by hospitality analyst HVS found at least 28 new hotels slated to open this year or next. The largest is the more than 600-room Intercontinental Times Square, which is set to debut in July; the smallest is the boutique 56-room Habita Hotel on the High Line on the West Side.

Meanwhile, another nine are in the works with unknown completion dates. Smith Travel Research estimates the increase of rooms in New York at
5.1 percent, while PKF senior vice president John Fox puts the increase
at a possible 8 percent, with 5,000 to 6,000 new rooms set to be added
to Manhattan’s roughly 72,000 existing rooms available per night. The
jump, Smith estimates, is the largest annual increase in hotel supply
in Manhattan since 1987, the year the firm set up shop. [more]