For more than five years as its CEO and president, Pam Liebman has steered the day-to-day course of the Corcoran Group, one of the biggest New York City-based residential brokerages. Liebman’s more than two decades of real estate experience give her a long-term perspective on the city’s housing market – the ups, the downs, and everything in between.
Liebman shared her views with The Real Deal in a free-flowing late November conversation in her Midtown office. Liebman talked about everything from development in Northern Jersey to the sharing of listings among Manhattan firms to the appeal of real estate as a career. The conversation with Liebman is part of The Real Deal’s regular podcast series and can be heard in full here. Some excerpts:
The Real Deal: Various third-quarter market reports, including one by Miller Samuel appraisers, showed that the luxury market seems to have stalled sales-wise. Why do you think that is?
Pam Liebman: Well, I think it’s pretty interesting what people have taken away from all these reports. The press has really been looking for a negative story for several years, and these market reports gave them the opportunity to pull out a few of the figures to really spin the negative story they wanted. I don’t particularly see a stall in the luxury market. What happened this year is a lot of people grabbed those third quarter numbers and compared them to the second quarter. If you took them the way they’re usually compared, year over year, they were up significantly. If you take the average price in certain sectors of the market, it looked as though the market had cooled. But I think what people don’t say is there were several significant buildings and significant apartments that closed in the second quarter, which drove those numbers up dramatically. And I’m not a Pollyanna about the market. I’m not going to sit here and tell you, ‘The market’s great, it’s only going up.’ But I will say that some of these stats pulled out of there related purely to average sales price and not to dollar per foot.
TRD: Is there too much inventory coming onto the market?
PL: Inventory will absolutely have an effect on the market because it’s the natural law of supply and demand. And what we’ve been suffering through the last couple of years is a severe lack of inventory, which has certainly put a lot of pressure on prices. Now, when we had no inventory on the market in April and May, there was a fight for these apartments. Now, there’s more choice, so buyers can be more selective.
TRD: How about the number of agents working in the city – are there too many? What’s still driving people to the profession?
PL: I think they’re attracted by the level of entrepreneurship that real estate can offer. Back when I first started in the business in 1985, growing up in Manhattan, having a lot of social connections, going to school here – that was very relevant to building your business, unless you were a superstar with a lot of start-up skills. I think now the market has changed, the type of product has changed, and I think there’s a lot of opportunity for people to be successful, young people, old people. And, certainly, second careers, too – we’re seeing a lot of attorneys and ex-Wall Streeters entering the market. Real estate has become a choice profession. It’s not a second or a third choice.
TRD: For the outer boroughs, did you ever, in your 20-year career, anticipate the demand for places like Brooklyn, and Long Island City in Queens?
PL: I looked at Brooklyn early on, and I thought that Brooklyn would get hot. But I’d be lying to you if I said I thought it would be as hot as it is now. If I had a crystal ball back then and I saw what was happening in Manhattan, then maybe I would have foreseen the natural expansion into Brooklyn. It’s so easy to get here, and the quality of projects that’s being built there is great, and now we’re going to see that in Long Island City as well. And the Jersey waterfront. We’re doing an enormous amount of work on the Jersey waterfront.
TRD: Will there ever be an MLS in Manhattan for the bigger firms?
PL: The bigger firms now probably offer the most cooperation in terms of sharing. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of at the Corcoran Group. We share our listings the minute we have them. We don’t even wait 72 hours. As they go into our computer, we send them out. We don’t care who sells our listings.