Matrix Blog

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

Now that I am fully recovered from Micro Week, I thought I would think a little bigger and present the Manhattan inventory picture by comparing new development and re-sales. I’ve charted it from the pre-Lehman high (PLH for those in the know) through the end of 2014 in two graphs. One shows the year-over-year change, and the other tracks inventory by units to help tell the whole story. Inventory was in a state of free fall for both types from 2009 through 2013, but in 2014 the picture clearly changed…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Three Cents Worth: New York’s Building Boom Doesn’t Mean More Units For Sale [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, Listing Inventory

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #279 NY] New York’s Building Boom Doesn’t Mean More Units For Sale

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

Uptown may have the smallest studios, but which Manhattan neighborhood can claim the most micro units? To find out, I looked at where apartments measuring 300 square feet or less are located and determined what they have in common—besides being small. We’ve appraised many micro apartments over the years, so I was admittedly a little confused at how micro apartments were some sort of new concept…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Three Cents Worth: Murray Hill Has the Most Micro Units in All of Manhattan [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, Micro Week, micro apartment

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #278 NY] Murray Hill Has the Most Micro Units in All of Manhattan

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

Although I’m often a bit macro in this column, it’s Micro Week at Curbed. So I thought I would rank Manhattan neighborhoods by the average square footage of their studio apartments based on all the closed sales of 2014. The results are in: if you want a plethora of small apartments, look uptown. On both the East and West Sides above 96th Street, from Morningside Heights and the Upper East Side to Harlem and Inwood, the average studio clocks in at under 500 square feet. By contrast, downtown, in areas like Soho, Tribeca, Battery Park City, and the Financial District, studios are larger…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Three Cents Worth: Which Manhattan Neighborhood Has The Smallest Studios? [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, 3CW, Micro Week, micro apartment

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #277 NY] Which Manhattan Neighborhood Has The Smallest Studios?

With the closing and recording of the record $100.47 million penthouse sale at One57, I thought it was time to dust-off the tall chart I created in 2012 when the prior record price of $88M at 15 Central Park West was set.

This week I ended up writing a piece about tall towers in my Bloomberg View column called Living the High Life, another one on Curbed NY for my Three Cents Worth called Proving New York’s Blockbuster $100M Sale Is An Outlier which provided some needed context for the new record sale in the following scattergraph. Note the $100.47M record sale in the upper right hand corner and then scroll down…a lot.

[click to expand]

Tags: One57, 432 Park Avenue, Tall Tower, 15 CPW, Nordstrom Tower

Comments Off on Tallest Chart in the History of Manhattan Real Estate, Continued

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

Finally, after nearly two years of referring to the $88 million sale at 15 Central Park West as the “highest Manhattan residential sale on record,” we get a change of scenery. A new record was set with the $100.47 million sale of the penthouse at One57 recorded late last week. Timing is everything, although, in this case timing really wasn’t. I believe this sale went to contract in 2012, which would be shortly after the $88 million sale went to contract in December 2011 and closed in early 2012. While these super luxury sales are more of a circus sideshow and have little, if anything, to do with the vast majority of the Manhattan housing market, I find them surreal to consider…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Three Cents Worth: Proving New York’s Blockbuster $100M Sale Is An Outlier [Curbed]

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Tags: Curbed NY, Tall Tower, Breaking Excel

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #276 NY] Proving New York’s Blockbuster $100M Sale Is An Outlier

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

As 2014 winds down I thought I’d break down the year’s condo market by splitting up resales and new development closings using median sales price. Since early 2012, the new development and resale price trends have parted ways. That’s when the stalled shadow inventory that resulted from the Lehman collapse—a.ka. condos that weren’t formally offered yet and went unsold, because first batches of units didn’t sell in the midst of the financial downturn—was finally bought up or otherwise absorbed…

[click to expand chart]

My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Three Cents Worth: Why New Developments Are So Darn Pricey [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, 3CW

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #275 NY] Why New Developments Are So Darn Pricey

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

This week I took a look at the volume of super high end sales that closed each quarter to show how out of whack current activity is when compared to longer term norms. From 2006 through 2013, the average was 21 apartments sales for $10M or higher per quarter. That’s seven per month or nearly two per week for eight years. That’s a lot of sales in this price segment…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Three Cents Worth: Number of Manhattan Homes Selling for $10M+ Is Way Up [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, 3CW

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #274 NY] Number of Manhattan Homes Selling for $10M+ Is Way Up

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

Before the tryptophan kicks in on Thursday, I thought I’d present the rental market trends for Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens coverage in another way. Because of seasonality, I tend to rely on median rental price compared to the same period a year ago. I applied a 90-day moving average as a trend line for each of the markets to help show where these markets seem to be headed…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Three Cents Worth: No Relief In Sight For New York Renters [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, 3CW, median rental price

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #273 NY] Three Cents Worth: No Relief In Sight For New York Renters

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

Having that doorman just got more expensive. The difference between the average rental of a building with and without a doorman was at its widest point since we began to track this metric in 2007. The average rental price in a doorman building was $4,915, up 17.8 percent over the past 7 years and the highest recorded over this period. The average rental price in a non-doorman building was $3,461, up a more modest 5.8 percent over the same period. The difference between the two rental types resulted in an eight-year high of $1,645 per month…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: The Cost Of Your Doorman Keeps Rising [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, 3CW, doorman

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #272 NY] The Cost Of Your Doorman Keeps Rising

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

Although it has been a little more than a month since the third quarter ended, I thought I’d show that the average sales price of the five boroughs in aggregate broke the $1 million threshold for the first time, to a record $1,040,516…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: How New York’s Average Sales Price Broke the $1 Million Mark [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, 3CW, Bronx, Staten Island

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #271 NY] How New York’s Average Sales Price Broke the $1 Million Mark

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

While there is an obsession with views in the Manhattan market and it is one of the drivers of the tall tower phenomenon, there are a bunch of moving parts associated with it. We looked at the last two years of closed sales (to get enough data) on the four borders of Central Park, comparing the average price per square foot of co-op and condo apartments with direct views of the park—including both those above and below the treeline—and those with city views.

These results, shown in the infographic below, reflect the difference between the view types —but it does not mean that a park view on Fifth Avenue is worth 75.6 percent more than a city view on Fifth Avenue… just because of the view. A key difference between the view types is that the apartments with park views tend to be larger. The average size of a Fifth Avenue sale with a direct park view was 83.2 percent bigger than an apartment without a park view. Manhattan Co-op/Condo Values With and Without Park Views So Manhattan apartment prices on a per square foot basis reflect a significant premium per square foot for larger continuous space. Back to my Fifth Avenue example, the 75.6 percent difference reflects a “double-dip”—park views are more expensive and sell for more per square footage, but they also tend to be larger and therefore sell for more per square foot. Still, it’s a lot more expensive to have a park view than not have a park view.

My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: What Is the Value of a Central Park View? [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, Central Park, 3CW, view

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #270 NY] What Is the Value of a Central Park View?

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column I posted a few weeks ago on @CurbedNY:

As summer comes to a close and many have checked out until Labor Day, I thought I’d try another GIF animation (after the jump!) to illustrate the long fall of inventory (I’m on the “pronounced like ‘Jif’ peanut butter” team, as is the format’s inventor). August generally represents the annual low for inventory (even though fourth quarter of 2013 was quarterly record bottom, August 2013 was the record monthly bottom). I thought I’d show the last decade worth of inventory and provide some context to how low inventory actually is…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Charting A Decade of Manhattan Inventory [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, 3CW

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #269 NY] Charting A Decade of Manhattan Inventory