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Charts
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The Winter 2022 issue of Elliman Magazine was published this week and it is quite a beautiful publication. I created a chart for the publication which compares month listing inventory trends across a number of the markets we cover for Douglas Elliman.
[click to expand image]
Tags: Elliman Magazine, Douglas Elliman
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Articles
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I whipped up eight charts using data from our expanding Douglas Elliman Market Report Series to touch base on a wide array of U.S. housing markets. These charts appeared on pages 280-282 in the 2020 Spring/Summer edition of Elliman Magazine. Click on each graphic to expand.
Tags: Elliman Magazine, Townhouses, Cash, Los Angeles, Greenwich, Downtown Boston, Miami Beach, Long Island, Aspen, Market Update
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I got to speak with Lisa Abramowicz on her Bloomberg TV show “Money Undercover” yesterday. She is a great follow on Twitter. Best of all, I sat in a comfy chair.
Lisa mentioned the topic of “inventory loans” that developers are relying heavily on to limp to the next upcycle with lots of unsold inventory. Hedge funds have dived headfirst into this space, even developers who are in good financial state are lending money on unsold condo inventory. These loans are another way that financial engineering prevents the market from healing in the long run. This loan product reminds me of the actions of the Fed and FDIC a decade ago whose policy changes allowed banks to avoid “mark to market” so they wouldn’t be insolvent on their balance sheet. The goal is to sit and pretend everything is alright until enough time passes when everything becomes okay again.
While the interview was occurring, a real estate agent I know was walking down the street and saw me being interviewed via television sitting in a bank window. He emailed me a picture of it with a chuckle. The agent said he couldn’t hear what I had to say but hoped the news was good. Well, it is good news for South Florida property sellers.
Tags: Bloomberg TV, Lisa Abramowicz, Money Undercover, inventory loans, condo inventory
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Charts
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Douglas Elliman Real Estate just published their fall issue. I created the content for pages 208-209 and I think it looks pretty snazzy (and interesting).
Click on image below to expand.
Tags: Elliman Magazine
Almost two years ago the real estate new development world was rocked by the New York Times epic page one story by Louise Story and Stephanie Saul about foreign investment in U.S. real estate. The vehicle for “Towers of Secrecy” purchases was the ubiquitous LLC shell corporation. While I’m no advocate of illegal activity for the sake of preserving the health of a real estate market, I was very skeptical and outspoken about the challenge of measuring the impact of this new rule. Especially since the new development market had already started to show signs of over supply by mid 2014 in both Manhattan above $3M and Miami above $1M. It also seemed to single out wealthy buyers who did not want to get a mortgage. How could the effectiveness of this six month rule be measured reliably enough to be extended or made permanent when the market was already falling?
Since these series of articles came out, I have learned a lot more about the scale of kleptocracy around the world and more appreciative of what the rule attempted to accomplish.
Fast forward to 2017 and the super lux (≥$5M) new development condo market cooled sharply. The rule has been extended but is now up for renewal in a month. It is not clear whether the new administration will renew it. Nicholas Nehamas of the Miami Herald penned are great recap of the rule status. To make it even better, he included a YouTube video of bulldozers playing chicken in the piece.
I have to say I admire the messaging that came out of Homeland Security to justify the rule’s impact. Whether or not the following is an exageration, the mere existance of the rule is probably an effective deterent.
“We don’t come across [money laundering in real estate] once every 10 or 12 cases,” said John Tobon, U.S. Homeland Security Investigations Deputy Special Agent in Charge for South Florida. “We come across real estate being purchased with illicit funds once every other case.”
Here are the areas current covered by the Treasury rule.
Using the parameters of the rule, the Miami Herald asked that I analyze sales in the five boroughs of NYC since enactment. I stuck with condos and 1-3 families since co-ops tend not be a preferred property type of foreign buyers. I found that sales dropped 6% year over year for the aggregate of Manhattan sales over $3M and the outer borough sales of $1.5M. This included legacy contracts that closed during the rule enactment period but went to contract before it started. Those sales likely softened the actual decline in sales.
While it appears reasonable that the rule had some drag on demand, a possible repeal in February won’t likely have much of an impact on the oversupply that currently exists.
Tags: US Treasury, Miami Herald, Nicholas Nehamas, FinCEN, kleptocracy
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Favorites
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I really enjoyed my interview over at Yahoo! Finance this week discussing the release of the Elliman Report: Manhattan Sales 1Q 2016. Love their longer interview format.
Note the “two comma” reference taken from the HBO show Silicon Valley:
Miller also rejects the thesis that Manhattan’s two-comma real estate prices were being fueled solely by foreign money and are now jeopardized by global uncertainty and a stronger dollar versus emerging market currencies.
Additional insights on the report shared on the recent edition of Housing Notes. Sign up here.
Tags: Alexis Christoforous, Lawrence Lewitinn
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There has been voluminous discussion in recent years about following and marketing to the high end of the demographic scale, especial the real estate market. It’s been the focus of much of the new housing development action of the past five years, especially in big U.S. coastal cities. The high end development market has been widely chronicled here and within my weekly Housing Notes newsletter.
For buyers in the super luxury housing market, owning multiple homes is less about a primary residence with a second home and more about owning “stops on the big circuit.”
And as the rich own a greater share of real estate, major cities like New York, Los Angeles and London are going through a kind of “resortification,” familiar to posh beach towns or ski resorts, as their populations become more seasonal.
For Manhattan, these birds are rare in February and squawking on all treetops (bad pun for super tall condo penthouses) at full capacity in June.
And no, I never liked that band.
Tags: Seasonality, Robert Frank, Wealth Report, Knight Frank, pied-a-terre, wealth, Douglas Elliman, second home
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Charts
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It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed Miami, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the Magic City. And I’m taking notes on the beach.
Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedMiami:
As we make our way through the second quarter (more than halfway!), I took a look at some trends extracted from the first quarter reports we prepare for Douglas Elliman. I went all out and created a four charter that addresses a number of issues born out of the financial crisis that still touch the current market..
[click to expand chart]
My latest Three Cents Worth column: Three Cents Worth: Miami Drill Down: Picking Up the Scraps of the Financial Crisis [Curbed]
Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed NY
Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed DC
Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed Miami
Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed Hamptons
Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed LA
Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed Ski
Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed Miami, 3CW, financial crisis
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Public
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Since it’s the end of the year, I’ve been thinking about some of my favorite events 2014. This past November, I was invited to keynote and moderate the main panel at the Urban Land Institute’s, Southeast FL/Caribbean District Council’s Miami Condo Market Symposium.
My panel included the heavy hitters of condo development and brokerage in South Florida – who spoke candidly in front of a sold out venue at the Epic Residences & Hotel:
– Ugo Colombo, Founder, CMC Group Inc.
– Eduardo Costantini, Chairman, Consultatio Real Estate Inc.
– Richard LeFrak, Chairman & CEO, LeFrak Organization
– Howard Lorber, CEO, Vector Group Ltd. & Chairman, Douglas Elliman
– Jorge Perez, Chairman, CEO & Founder, The Related Group
A recap of my panel and the other speakers and panels…
Photos…
Tags: Ugo Colombo, CMC Group Inc., Eduardo Costantini, Richard LeFrak, Howard Lorber, Jorge Perez, The Related Group, Vanessa Grout, Jay Parker
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Read my latest Bloomberg View column The $10 Million Home, Never Hotter. Please join the conversation over at Bloomberg View. Here’s an excerpt…
As the U.S. housing market cools from last year’s overheated state, sales of homes at the top haven’t been following the same script. Prices and sales at the upper reaches are soaring…
My Bloomberg View Column Directory
My Bloomberg View RSS feed.
Tags: $10 million
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Knight Frank published their quarterly Prime Global Cities Index today and North America led the way as a region with a 14.5% rise in prices. “Prime” translates to “Luxury” in US housingspeak. We provide research for their Manhattan and Miami results through the Elliman Reports we prepare.
The report conclusion succinctly summarizes the state of high end housing today and speaks to the global phenomenon:
…the index’s annual increase of 6.2% in the year to June is above the long-run average of 4.6% recorded since Lehman’s collapse in the third quarter of 2008, underlining the extent to which prime property has become a favoured asset class globally.
Here’s the table…
[click on table to open report]
Tags: Prime Global Cities Index, Kate Everett-Allen
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Infographics
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Here’s a jumbo infographic from Douglas Elliman covering the findings of the four market reports in South Florida we prepare for them. Thank goodness Matrix can handle super tall images.
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Jonathan Miller is President and CEO of Miller Samuel Inc., a real estate appraisal and consulting firm he co-founded in 1986. He is a state-certified real estate appraiser in New York and Connecticut, performing court testimony as an expert witness in various local, state, and federal courts. He holds the Counselors of Real Estate (CRE) designation, is an Appraiser “A” Member of the Real Estate Board of New York, and is a member of RAC.
Learn More...
You'll be able to choose from an array of robust housing metrics compiled using research developed during the preparation of our market report series. Expanded significantly from prior offerings, use this resource to build charts and custom data tables or leverage your own information for more powerful research and presentations.
In the meantime, here is a small sample of the aggregated data we will provide.
Forbes ('20-)
Appraisersblogs ('17-)
'Three Cents Worth' column 3CW ('05-'16)
When Curbed was acquired by Vox, my eleven years of 3CW chart art and column links were broken on Curbed NY, Curbed DC, Curbed Miami, Curbed Hamptons, Curbed LA, and Curbed Ski.
Many of my 3CW charts can be found here:
Curbed 3CW Full Chart Archive
Op-ed column ('14-'15)
'Economic Spotlight column ('03-'09)
New York Times experiment ('08-09')
Huffington Post (09')
Favorite "How to Value" Posts
Recent Comments on Matrix