Matrix Blog

Read my latest Bloomberg View column A Housing Recovery Built to Last?.

Here’s an excerpt…

The housing market has recovered in fits and starts since the financial crisis, so it’s worth noting when one important indicator looks really strong. This is the case with the pending home sales index, which reflects contracts signed for purchases of single-family homes, co-ops and condos, published by the National Association of Realtors…

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Tags: Pending Home Sale Index, Housing Recovery, Seasonal Adjustment, PHSI, NAR, National Association of Realtors

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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:

After covering more serious topics as of late, this week I thought I’d lighten things up and look at New York city’s signed contracts by day of the week. I used the roughly 2,000 contract dates I had for the closed sales in Q1 of 2015, as used in the Elliman Report for that time period, and parsed out the market by day of the week. Strategically, there is probably nothing to be learned from this exercise, but hey, it’s an angle I’ve never examined before…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Three Cents Worth: 6 Graphs That Prove New York Real Estate’s Love of Mondays [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, Contracts, 3CW, Mondays

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Read my latest Bloomberg View column Invest in a Painting, Not a Condo.

Here’s an excerpt…

A couple of weeks ago, Laurence Fink, the chief executive officer of BlackRock Inc., observed that “the two greatest stores of wealth internationally today is contemporary art … and apartments in Manhattan, apartments in Vancouver, in London”…

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Tags: Art, painting, Knight Frank Investment Index, cars, Dow Jones Industrial Average, gold, Miller Samuel

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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:

A lot of time and energy has been spent writing about one of the biggest challenges to the New York City housing market in recent years: affordability. One of the primary observations of the purchase market has been the lower number of first time buyers, both locally and nationally. Tight credit, slow household formation, and a creaky economy have been a root cause of keeping their participation muted, but it’s also the disproportionately higher price growth over the long term for smaller apartments. Here’s my attempt to illustrate this trend, using data from the last 25 years…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Three Cents Worth: Smaller Manhattan Apartments Keep Getting More Expensive [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, Listing Inventory, entry-level, trade up

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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

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Read my latest Bloomberg View column Want a New House? Good Luck.

Here’s an excerpt…

Much of the analysis of the housing market focuses on sales volume and price trends. These are important metrics, of course, but they really don’t tell you much about market fundamentals because they are, to a great extent, derivative…

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Tags: Listing Inventory, credit crunch, NAR, National Association of Realtors

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Read my latest Bloomberg View column House Rich, Land Poor.

Here’s an excerpt…

The living space in newly built U.S. homes is on a tear: Since 1982, the size of a new single-family house has increased by almost 1,000 square feet — which was the size of the average U.S. house in 1950…

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The trend continued after a brief interruption during the early days of the financial crisis…

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Tags: New Home Sales, Square Footage, Average Square Feet, U.S. Census, land, lot size

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Read my latest Bloomberg View column The Bidding Wars Are Back.

Hard to believe this is happening again…

Here’s an excerpt…

A relic from the days of the housing boom is making a comeback. The share of sales that feature bidding wars is up. According to the National Association of Realtors, 33 percent of all sales were at or above the asking price, a strong indication that more than one bidder was involved in a transaction…

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Tags: Listing Inventory, bidding wars, NAR, National Association of Realtors

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Read my latest Bloomberg View column Income Inequality Hits the Housing Market.

This article turned out to be my most-commented on piece so far. The topic of affordability generates a hotbed of conversation.

Here’s an excerpt…

There’s been plenty of talk recently about signs of recovery in the housing market. Rather than think about housing as a single market, it might be helpful to look at housing as many markets based on everything from geography to price to new versus existing…

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Tags: New Home Sales, U.S. Census

1 Comment

Read my latest Bloomberg View column Real-Estate Agents Ride High Again.

It was disappointing to have so many Realtors go on the attack over this piece showing they missed the entire point – I was writing about the trend, not the dollars or the splits. Are commission incomes higher in say Manhattan than in rural Texas. Doh! The very idea that incomes are rising after years of low transaction volume plus the lack of resurgence in NAR membership since the financial crisis has made for a little less competition today. This seems like good news to me for the industry. But with the barrier to entry so low, the window will close sooner than later.

I even had a PR executive at NAR send me a critical email concerning my numerical calculations and results but made the mistake of exposing her significant lack of understanding about what data NAR actually publishes. To avoid embarrassing her I opted not to share the letter in this post.

Here’s an excerpt…

This is turning out to be a pretty nice time to be a residential real-estate agent. As the housing market recovers, average income has been rising faster than sales largely because there are fewer agents planting for-sale signs…

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Tags: real estate brokers, commissions, transaction cost, NAR, National Association of Realtors

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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

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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

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