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The New York Times got the market nuances right in their epic end of year The Real Estate Collapse of 2020.

And including epic charts makes it even better.

I noticed that the Streeteasy median rent chart used in the piece shows the same pattern as my recent chart in Bloomberg. That drop in rent is gigantic.

[Source: Bloomberg – click image to open article]

Tags: New York Times, StreetEasy, Bloomberg News, NYT Real Estate, 2020, Stefanos Chen, Vivian Marino

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I am reading a lot more about everything right now, including real estate. Yesterday’s Bloomberg article caught my eye: Greenwich Homeowner Bets on Virus Getaway Pitch to Win a Sale. Desperation to sell can take many forms. Please read on.

The article featured a listing in Greenwich, CT that came on 68 days ago that wasn’t moving (I assume this based on what was done later). Here is the text for the original listing displayed at the bottom the screenshot:

Like new light-filled house with a modern design by Donald Breismeister including 9 ft ceilings on the first floor. High-tech amenities throughout with e-thermostat, lighting and security cameras all hardwifred CAT-5 wiring throughout. Bathrooms are beautiful and modern with separate steamshower and large whirlpool tub. Nice front yard and backyard has large entertainment deck. All these amenities are just two blocks from the Post Road on a quiet road within walking distance to GreenwichHS, Greenwich Country Day and Central MS.

[click to expand]

With the sales market slowing down despite entering peak selling season, many homeowners are reluctant to add their homes to the rental market. The owner in the article said:

“I rented property in the past. It’s too much hassle. My trust level is pretty low with renters.”

About ten days ago the listing was modified by raising the price to $100,000 and throwing in a 2011 Subaru, linens, televisions, etc. and rebranding the sales effort as a Coronavirus Special (bold emphasis mine).

CORONAVIRUS SPECIAL – Some houses are move-in ready. This house is live-in ready. It comes with all furniture, kitchen appliances, washer & dryer, dishes, silverware, TVs, pool table, beds, linens, lawn equipment and even a car. Everything you need to enjoy living in your own house in Greenwich. The house was designed by an award winning architect with lots of custom features. The first floor has high ceilings and two fireplaces. You have a Costco closet just off the 2-car garages and 5 BRs upstairs.You have town water, gas and sewer and are close to both public and private schools. Tomney is a quiet side street, but near downtown, the train and I-95.If you don’t want the time and hassle of arranging movers and buying lots of new items, this house is ready for you now.

While I very much appreciate how hard it is right now to market a home for sale during a global pandemic, the marketing of a home as a CORONAVIRUS SPECIAL is a bit tone-deaf especially when raising the price to include a bunch of the seller’s personal stuff. “Throwing in” used furniture, appliances, linens and an old car by raising the listing price by $100,000 is not, by definition, “throwing it in.”

When I first saw the listing in the Bloomberg piece I thought about all the snarky headlines during other pandemics/tragedies and using brutal sarcasm I found myself chuckling from the absurdity of all of it. Now, as I was writing this post a day later, the initial LMAO title ideas felt icky and were not worth repeating.

Q: Can you imagine associating the word “SPECIAL” with these?

• AIDS
• SARS
• H1N1
• 9/11

A: I didn’t think so.

Times like this call for creative marketing and perhaps the Bloomberg story and even this blog post may bring new eyeballs to the listing to help it sell. I suspect that won’t happen because the appearance of the home and what comes with it for the price isn’t the problem. The agent is definitely not the problem. The seller is definitely not the problem. The problem is the sudden change in the world we live in and the understanding that it will take time to adapt. Our initial impulses to take action, such as this situation, are often wrong.

Tags: Coronavirus

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I had a nice chat with Vonnie Quinn of Bloomberg Television on Monday concerning the state of the Manhattan housing market, following a highly read Bloomberg article on the terminal covering our Elliman Report results for Q3-2019 as well as a followup on Bloomberg Radio here and here.

Tags: Bloomberg TV, Bloomberg Radio, Vonnie Quinn, Podcast, Elliman Report, Denise Pellegrini

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For those of you that read my weekly Housing Notes, you’ll know I refer to 2014 as “Peak New Development” for the Manhattan housing market. “Peak Luxury” works as a label too.

Bloomberg news broke the story that a $50M+ condo purchased in 2014 just sold at a foreclosure auction for $36,000,0000. There were five bidders. It’s been the fourth resale since the market peaked and the sixth overall – so I created a graphic of all the resales to show how they fared before and after the 2014 “peak.”

The Bloomberg story (that I got to chime in on) lays out the details of the One57 auction sale: One57 Foreclosure Shatters Price Dreams at Billionaires’ Tower

The story reached #1 as the most read on the 350k± Bloomberg Terminals worldwide yesterday.

It is important to remember that there are still a fair amount of units remaining that are priced at 2014 levels. Extell, the developer, has their work cut out for them to compete with current market conditions.

While One57 is a symbolic poster child for the new dev phenomenon, it is not a proxy for the entire new development market. Some projects were priced more reasonably at the peak, hence they haven’t fallen as much. In addition, the quality and design of each project can vary greatly. One thing is clear – since the 2014 peak, investors don’t have the same potential for big and fast returns on flips – their initial strategy was to buy early and realize instant equity as the sponsor increased the offering prices. That scenario no longer applies. Since the market has more choices for buyers now than it did back during peak, One57 is no longer seen as a “new” building like it was back then.

CNBC picked up the story – My firm and I get a shoutout during the conversation on Sqawkbox which was pretty cool.

Luxury condo in One57 tower sold in New York City’s biggest ever foreclosure auction from CNBC.

And here’s the transcript on yesterday’s PBS Nightly Business Report show (owned by CNBC) with the shoutout that is making the rounds.

Tags: One57, Extell, Bloomberg News, Number 1 on Bloomberg Terminals

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If you’re a subscriber to the Bloomberg Terminals, as roughly 350,000 people are (paying $1,600+ per terminal per month), then you may already know there are a half dozen charts on the Manhattan luxury housing market. To be clear, these indices don’t suggest that housing price trends should be presented as a stock ticker.

It’s a good thing too, since the thought of making real estate housing markets equate to stocks was inspired by, and then was crushed by, the housing boom-bubble-bust era 2003-2008.

Here’s why a stock ticker for real estate is a flawed (aka dumb) concept:

• A stock market moves in the context of nanoseconds rather than weeks or months.
• Contract data is not available market-wide and if it were, lags the market by several weeks.
• Closed data used in a ticker would lag the market by months.
• It implies instant liquidity for real estate holdings.
• Not all property types see high volume so their trends are extrapolated (and thus diluted).
• It teaches market participants that short term views on real estate holdings are the norm, the way a stock day trader views the market.

While a daily real estate index can be created with relative technical ease, it doesn’t mean it is a good idea. It infers a level of precision that doesn’t exist and an accuracy based on lagging data that is not understood by users.

Those who push the stock ticker idea either didn’t work through the last cycle in real estate, or they didn’t learn from the experience.

We update 3 charts on the Manhattan luxury sales market and 3 for the Manhattan luxury rental market. I have always defined “luxury” as the top 10% of transactions during a period.

Click on the gallery below to open each of the indices.

Tags: Stocks, Bloomberg Terminals, stock ticker, liquidity

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The Bloomberg News story “Brooklyn Homes Sell at Record Pace in Outer-Borough Surge” was the 3rd most read story on the Bloomberg terminals world wide this afternoon.

Here’s the Douglas Elliman report.

The Brooklyn housing story in fact earned more reads than the Stanford Business School sex scandal, the Bill Gross $200M lawsuit against PIMCO and Deutsche Bank’s $7B loss this quarter.

After all, Brooklyn is now a global brand.

Tags: global, Bloomberg News, Oshrat Carmiel, Bloomberg Terminals, brand

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Douglas Elliman published our research today covering Queens sales, Brooklyn sales Westchester/Putnam sales as well as the rental market for Manhattan Brooklyn & Queens. You can download the reports and more at Douglas Elliman’s market report page.

Like last week’s Manhattan report, there were lots of records set and it wasn’t simply the influence of high end sales – prices were up across the board in most markets.

Incidentally, the Bloomberg News article that covered record Queens condo sales was the second most emailed story world-wide. It stoked more interest than the finance crisis in Greece and the recent Chinese stock market gyrations. Apparently only “investors with satellites” was a more popular read.

Idea (?) for next quarter: Talk about drones and investors in the Queens housing market.

Tags: Greece, most emailed, Chinese stock market

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Always fun to visit with Tom Keene on Bloomberg Surveillance Television – I forgot to post it last week.

Did I tell you I have a lot going on?

It’s a short clip on housing and why we don’t have enough inventory. Bloomberg Intelligence’s Carl Riccadonna spoke along with me – never met him before but he was impressive and best of all, we were in sync.

Tags: Tom Keene, Bloomberg TV, Bloomberg Surveillance, Bloomberg Intelligence, Carl Riccadonna

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When I was called by Bloomberg News about a new Bel Air (LA) listing that was asking $500m and another one down the block by the same architect but different developer at around $400 million, my initial reaction was laughter. I wasn’t doubting that there could be a buyer somewhere out there somewhere…but rather at the absurdity of it. It also seems like a strike against it to have a nearby home done by the same architect, no?

As I told a bank executive/client this morning that it’s clearly a strange world when someone builds spec housing for a handful of buyers worldwide and no houses in the local market have ever sold close to half the proposed asking price (including Jeff Greene’s $195 million listing that has been on the market since December.)

At a combined $100k square feet (main house + 3 smaller houses), it will be bigger than “Versailles” a 90k square foot house outside of Orlando, Florida that was the subject of the documentary “Queen of Versailles.”

According to NAR, the U.S. median home sales price is currently $219,400.

If the Bel Air home is sold, it is doubtful this would end up as someone’s primary residence. Perhaps we should label this type of asset as something else besides a “home?”

How about a Palace?

That’s what the architect suggested:

“It’s very similar to a palace,” he said. “The house is about public functions rather than domestic living.”

Tags: Queen of Versailles, highest list price, Nile Niami, Christie’s International Real Estate, Paul McClean, Jeff Greene, NAR, National Association of Realtors

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Was asked to guest host this morning for the 7-8am hour on Bloomberg TV’s Surveillance. Tom Keene, Scarlet Fu and Adam Johnson team up for a must-watch show every morning.

In the first clip we talk Manhattan Luxury market problems and records. In the second clip we banter about the bendable iPhone Plus and housing as an investment. These two articles likely prompted my invite:

NYC Luxury-Condo Buyers Await New Towers as Sales Slow [Bloomberg News]
NYC’s Most Expensive Condo to Be Listed at $130 Million [Bloomberg News]

Tags: Tom Keene, Bloomberg TV, Scarlet Fu, Bloomberg Surveillance, Adam Johnson, iPhone, Apple, Stocks

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UPDATE: above clip just added – expanded conversation.

Got to guest host an hour (6am to 7am) of Bloomberg Television’s Surveillance with Tom Keene, Scarlett Fu and Adam Johnson to talk housing. The above is just a couple of minutes of the hour (yes, you’re spared). We spoke about Case Shiller, New Home Sales, biting in World Cup Soccer, my fireman son using a GoPro in fires and LeBron/Carmelo’s real worth among other things. Like I said, we did talk housing.

Adam brought up a great point – while the economy is always characterized as 70% consumer driven, 16% of that is actually health care spending so the overall number is really 54%.

Very smart conversations (the topic of biting included). Always fun to join them.

Tags: Case-Shiller, New Home Sales, S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices

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This morning, I got to join Tom Keene, Adam Johnson and Cristina Alesci on Bloomberg TV’s Surveillance to talk housing for the 6am to 7am hour. Definitely worth getting up at 4am to make into the studio. No, really!

Covered a lot of ground this morning on the show. Here’s another clip.

Tags: Tom Keene, Bloomberg TV, Bloomberg Surveillance, Adam Johnson, Cristina Alesci

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