From left: Muffin Dowdle, broker at Ginnel Real Estate; Cathleen Smith, president of Coldwell Banker Residential
Brokerage, Connecticut/Westchester; Houlihan Lawrence CEO Chris Meyers; Chris Raveis, managing partner of William Raveis
Real Estate, Mortgage & Insurance; and Mark Nadler, president/principal broker of Prudential Centennial

From the December issue: Westchester may be the suburb that’s home to some of the area’s biggest local celebrities — from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Martha Stewart — but that hasn’t prevented market forces from taking hold of the real estate market there.

Just north of the city, the county has been struggling for the last few years and, like the market in the city, hasn’t fully rebounded yet.

In this month’s Q&A, The Real Deal talked to brokers and market analysts about everything from Westchester’s super-luxury market to the rental market to the foreclosure situation.

Our sources said that after several years of stagnation, there was finally an uptick in sales volume in the third quarter. But that improvement didn’t translate into prices, which are still down by as much as 10 percent from a year ago and by 30 to 40 percent from the boom. [more]

From left: Neil Binder, president of Bellmarc, and Chris Raveis, managing partner of William Raveis

The planned purchase of a large stake in Bellmarc Realty by William Raveis Real Estate, which would have been one of the larger real-estate acquisitions in recent memory, is dead.

Neil Binder, Bellmarc’s president, confirmed today to The Real Deal that during negotiations in recent weeks the two sides could not bridge their differences about how a brokerage should be run.

“As we continued to progress on trying to create a framework for marriage, it appeared to both sides that we had different business models,” Binder said, without elaborating about whether the disagreement was over price or how the combined company might function on a day-to-day basis. [more]

Connecticut’s residential real estate brokerage William Raveis Real Estate has announced it is continuing its push into Westchester County by partnering with Legends Realty Group, a 19-employee firm based in Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow.

It comes two days after Prudential Douglas Elliman announced it has entered the Westchester market for the first time with the acquisition of Prudential Holmes & Kennedy, a six-office firm.

With today’s move, Raveis, which has joined with five other offices in Westchester in the last 18 months, solidifies a beachhead in an affluent area, though one that has struggled through the downturn. [more]

From the February issue: The New York City real estate world has closely followed as brokerages here have downsized and shuttered offices. But just north of the city, in Westchester, the real estate industry has quietly seen a shift of its own. Indeed, some say the brokerage world there has been irrevocably altered during the downturn as some firms have announced closures, and others have set up shop or merged with larger corporate entities, poaching agents along the way. The biggest shake-up, of course, was Sotheby’s International Realty’s October decision to terminate its presence in the county altogether. Sotheby’s sold four of its offices — its three “golden triangle” offices in Scarsdale, Rye and Larchmont, as well as one in Chappaqua — to an affiliate, William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty. In addition, it shut down a fifth office in Katonah, farther north in Westchester. That follows Better Homes and Gardens Rand Realty, which has seven offices in Westchester with roughly 340 agents, joining the Realogy umbrella at the end of April.  [more]