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:

After an insanely chaotic and active 2013, it’s probably time to think about how 2014 is shaping up inventory-wise. At the end of last year, I was of the opinion that listing inventory was at or near a bottom and we would see some increase in supply but not nearly enough to match demand. And so far that has been the story. In this week’s column, I took a look at the first eight weeks of each year going back to 2009. Inventory always rises at the beginning of the year as sellers anticipate the spring market and skip over the December doldrums. I’d go back further in time, but I only began tracking inventory on a weekly basis in addition to monthly right after Lehman collapsed (I had more time on my hands). This analysis looks at overall Manhattan inventory at all price points—clearly there are nuances not reflected, i.e. luxury listings at historical averages while the remainder at chronic lows, so relax…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Inventory Rising At Fastest Pace in 4 Years [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, Listing Inventory, 3CW

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #261 NY] Inventory Rising At Fastest Pace in 4 Years

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:

In this week’s column, I thought I’d look at something near and dear to our economic hearts: tracking rental versus mortgage payments in Manhattan. Above, you’ll find Manhattan’s median sales price for co-ops and condos, as well as median rental prices, plotted against a theoretical monthly mortgage payment. At first I was using this to present the rent-or-buy decision, but the visual became a little more than that.

For the mortgage payment estimation, I used generic defaults of 20 percent down and 30-year fixed Freddie Mac mortgage rates using median sales prices as the anchor—understanding that a 20 percent down payment has not been a constant over the past 20 years. Although I’m only tracking principal and interest on the payment, I’m not factoring in the tax deduction either, so the offset is somewhat reasonable in this simple visual. Here’s what I found:…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Looking At Manhattan’s Mortgage History [Curbed]

Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed NY
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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, Rent versus Buy, 3CW, Freddie Mac

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #260 NY] Looking At Manhattan’s Mortgage History

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:

I get the feeling that many businesses (and the local economy) have been on some sort of “pause” during the past month, perhaps partially brought about by the weather. (Full disclosure: I’m the first to admit – I LOVE snow. I’ve even got a snowmaker at home.) Since the market is experiencing the tightest inventory levels in 14 years, I thought I’d compare seasonal inventory trends to seasonal snowfall trends…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Snowy Weather Keeps The Listings Away [Curbed]

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

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #259 NY] Snowy Weather Keeps The Listings Away

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 listing discount for the re-sale (existing) and new development sales markets. For purposes of this analysis, listing discount was defined as the percentage difference from the list price at the time of contract and the sales price. I also track this metric from the original listing price, but that metric is full of noise i.e. “my apartment is worth $25M so I’ll list if for $100M and hope I get lucky” and is less helpful to analyze trends. In theory (and the way I tend to view this listing discount), is that an apartment is not actually “in the market” until it is priced competitively—otherwise it’s just a number in a database or spreadsheet…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Manhattan Ain’t No Discount Outlet [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, Listing Discount, 3CW

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #258 NY] Manhattan Ain’t No Discount Outlet

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 the January market report gauntlet is behind me, I thought I’d return to what I really enjoy doing—shoveling snow. I mean, posting Three Cents Worth columns. Most readers at Curbed have been following the recent market insanity. In this chart, I presented the last six years of market data to illustrate three distinct market periods we have gone through and to guess what the fourth period will be….

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Three Cents Worth: ’13 Was An Anomaly, ’14 Will Be Boring [Curbed]

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

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #257 NY] ’13 Was An Anomaly, ’14 Will Be Boring

Ok, that’s a lot of hyperbole, the charts do look pretty cool all lined up below. Although the Matrix blog was quiet as we transitioned to a new web site, I still wrote a bunch of posts on Curbed over the past several months and thought I’d share. Here’s the list. Click on each blog title to go to the full post.

December 18, 2013 Curbed NY #256 Finding 2014 Clues In Oft-Overlooked Data

December 10, 2013 Curbed NY #255 Dogging Manhattan Apartment Values

December 3, 2013 Curbed NY #254 Tallest Rental Chart in Manhattan History

November 27, 2013 Curbed NY #253 Charting Manhattan’s So Not Tryptophan-Like Absorption Rate

November 19, 2013 Curbed NY #252 Sales Prices Way More Volatile Than Rents

November 14, 2013 Curbed NY #251 Manhattan Listings May Have Bottomed

Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed NY Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed DC Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed Miami Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed Hamptons

Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, Curbed Miami, Absorption, 3CW

Comments Off on Overwhelming Visual Recap of Prior ‘Three Cents Worth’ Columns #250 to #256

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:

Over the past five years (and for the 13+ years I’ve collected Manhattan listing inventory), supply bottoms in August and begins a short ascent in the fall. I took a look at the two-week period before and after the Labor Day bottom over the past five years…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Manhattan’s Labor Day Listing Bottom [Curbed]

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

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #248 NY] Manhattan’s Labor Day Listing Bottom

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 last week’s rental market report release, I thought I’d take a look at the average size of a sale and a rental over the past 20 years. Sales (blue line) represent co-ops and condos that closed during each period. Rentals (pink line) represent rentals that closed during each period…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Manhattan Unit Sizes No Small Change [Curbed]

Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed NY
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Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed Hamptons

Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, 3CW

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #247 NY] Manhattan Unit Sizes No Small Change

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 a long weekend and a suggestion from a friend, I thought I’d take a different look at how we got here by measuring the total square footage sold as a market metric. It reveals a somewhat different post-Lehman perspective than would be derived from price. The blue columns represent the total square footage closed during each period that were available immediately following the period. The pink horizontal lines represent average square footage sold per period and were described with a key market attribute during that period…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Manhattan Puts Best (Square) Foot Forward [Curbed]

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

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #245 NY] Manhattan Puts Best (Square) Foot Forward

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 thought I’d take a look at the breakdown of sales by price in the most recently completed quarter. Last year I was using a donut analogy to describe the Manhattan apartment market—weak in middle and strong on the outside (bottom/top). I wanted to illustrate how the mix in 2013 could be showing signs of change rather than continuing to see a disproportionate amount of activity on the margins. For reference I provided an inset in the form of a pie (sorry) chart to show a simple breakdown of the market in the second quarter of 2013…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Manhattan’s Middle Market Shows Life [Curbed]

Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed NY
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Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed Miami
Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed Hamptons

Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, 3CW

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth NY #244] Manhattan’s Middle Market Shows Life

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 last week’s release of our rental report for Manhattan and Brooklyn and with all the talk about the gap between the boroughs closing, I thought I’d revisit the topic and add the sales market to the rental mix…

As an added bonuses, notice all the troll commentary in this post. I’m noticing there is more of this as the market rises.

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Brooklyn Prices Closing Gap With Manhattan [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, 3CW

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth NY #241] Brooklyn Prices Closing Gap With 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:

Back from a too-short vacation and thought I’d veer away from luxury marketspeak and focus on “non-luxury”—that little 90 percent of the market that doesn’t get enough attention. Today there’s a story out on the Manhattan “non-luxury” market using the data in these charts. It basically shows that when you remove the top 10 percent of the market from the housing data, pace of absorption and collapse of inventory is much more severe than when presented together…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed:
Manhattan Market Tighter for Rest of Us [Curbed]

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

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth NY #240] Manhattan Market Tighter for Rest of Us