By now, everyone knows the financial reasons for the housing bubble, from lax lenders to greed. But there's another, emotional side: In our rootless and confusing culture, our domiciles have become more than mere shelters, investments, havens or even status symbols. Rather, they have become extensions of our narcissistic personalities, glorified by entire industries of shelter magazines, websites and cable networks.

It's no wonder, writes Meghan Daum in her new book "Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House," (Alfred A. Knopf), that by the middle of the decade, scads of Americans were "buying real estate and melting it down to liquid form and then injecting it into their veins."

It was an addiction shared by Ms. Daum, an essayist, novelist and columnist for the Los Angeles Times. And it almost ruined her life, she writes.

Fully aware of how neurotic such an obsession is, Ms. Da...Read More| Post a comment

RateYourBroker.com has added brokerages from Brooklyn! Check them out!

Rapid Realty, http://www.rapidnyc.com/ Flatfinders Realty, http://www.myflatfinders.com/ Boerum Hill Realty, http://www.boerumhillrealty.com/ Smith Hanten Realty, http://www.smithhanten.com/

A building manager was busted Tuesday for pocketing nearly $900,000 in rents paid at five upper Manhattan buildings by posing as the landlord, prosecutors said.

Luis Nunez, a married father of two, is charged with stealing $879,000, including monthly payments from Columbia University students living near the campus.

Prosecutors said Nunez, of the Bronx, spent the money enhancing his lifestyle.

"The defendant used the stolen money for furniture, jewelry, several vehicles, school tuition, etc.," Assistant District Attorney Om Gillett told a Manhattan judge.

Nunez, 42, was held on $50,000 bail after he pleaded not guilty to grand larceny charges, which could cost him seven years in prison.

The alleged 2005-to-2009 scam wasn't detected until Nunez started slacking off on duties unrelated to rent collections and the real landlords who were owed the money audited his work...Read More| Post a comment

CraigsList used to be the #1 destination for New Yorkers looking for apartment rental deals.  Nowadays, the venue has become a minefield of pitfalls to avoid, sending wannabe tenants to StreetEasy.  Here’s a bit of a breakdown of how this wondrous list of lists works in the world of NYC real estate.

• Traffic galore: So many eyeballs land on CL, that it’s almost impossible to avoid the site from a broker’s standpoint.  The sheer amount of traffic that this community gets from apartment hunters is astonishing, with everyone looking to get a deal and find that hidden gem or diamond in the rough.  It’s no wonder that hundreds of ads are posted on the site daily, with frequent double and triple posts of the very same apartment....Read More| Post a comment

It's Spring, and if you haven't noticed already, the apartment hunting frenzy is starting to get legs. Although there may be more options for renters this year and cheaper rents, the hunt for an apartment in Manhattan is still full of shady dealings and exhausting weekends.

If you've been through it before, you know what I am referring to.  If you don't then visit Time Out Magazine.

Also, subscribe to their magazine--it's cheap and it comes every week

Eberhart Brothers (http://eberhartbros.com) has listed two penthouse apartments for Rent—the first two of 2010 available for rent this coming season. As someone who has personally seen these penthouses, I can tell you they are awesome—as they are mostly listed in the Upper East Side so they are reasonably priced.

Per person, they range from about $1,300-$1,500 a person. Imagine being able to have 300 square feet of private outdoor space for such a reasonable price? You could definitely throw the best parties. Below is a sample floor plan of their penthouse apartments.

Per their website:

Built...Read More| Post a comment

The ritual flooding of our in-boxes with Manhattan real estate quarterly market reports is nigh, and the first three months of 2010 brought plenty of happy news, but sobering data, too. The breakdown:

• We’d heard late fall and winter that buyers were crowding open houses once more, and the numbers bear this out. According to the Brown Harris Stevens and Halstead reports, closings rose by an inspiring 92 percent from the same period last year. Market surveys typically differ from one firm to the next, but on this point they all agree. Streeteasy pegs that number at 83.6 percent; Corcoran, 23 percent (though after the usual lags of recording closed sales, number-crunchers there expect that number to hover at approximately 70 percent); and Jonathan Miller’s survey for Prudential Douglas Elliman&rsq...Read More| Post a comment

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We invest large amounts of time with buyers.  The key component to successfully working with buyers is the qualifying process. Qualifying is the lost art of the sales process. Sometimes we get so excited that we have a lead that we fail to determine its value. That is why the process of qualifying is focused on determining the value of leads.

To really have effectiveness in qualifying we must develop a series of questions. This series of questions or script has to be used every time. Every buyer must be evaluated on his response to these questions. Some examples of questions are:

How long have you been looking? If they have been looking for six months the motivation to buy may not be very high.

Do you need to sell a home before you can buy?  If you have to wait for their home to sell, how will this impact you?

Have you met with a lender?  Figure out if this potential lead g...Read More| Post a comment

Each year thousands of newly graduated students flock their way to NYC to try their luck and start their careers. At first almost everyone assume that there is a New York City apartments Rental waiting just for them.

First surprise they will encounter is probably the price for their dream…

The average monthly rent for a studio apartment in Manhattan Village, which considered being the majority of new comer’s favorite place of living, is just over $2,200 and if you want amenities such as doorman, it can get to a minimum of $3,500.

Most of the NYC newly Renters unwillingly need to come up with a higher budget then they first th...Read More| Post a comment

Scores of stalled construction projects can be found scattered around New York City, but one category of building that doesn’t seem to have been sidetracked by the recession is the luxury apartment rental.

At least 16 new rental buildings are expected to open in Manhattan in coming months, ranging from small buildings to 500-unit high-rises, for a total of more than 3,500 apartments. Brooklyn will get an additional 3,500 new apartments as well, including units in some buildings that opened in late 2009.

While 7,000 new apartments is a relatively small number for a city where 70 percent of 8 million residents live in rentals, many of the new buildings are concentrated in just three neighborhoods: Manhattan’s Hudson Yards area, downtown Brooklyn and Williamsburg.

These apartments are becoming available at a time when average rents are down by about 25 percent from the market’s height in ...Read More| Post a comment

The owners of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, the sprawling sister complexes overlooking the East River in Manhattan, will miss a $16 million loan payment on Friday, which would put them in technical default on their mortgages, and the 20,000 residents in limbo.

The $5.4 billion purchase of the complexes’ 110 buildings and 11,227 apartments by Tishman Speyer Properties and BlackRock Realty in 2006 made headlines. But the denouement at Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper has cast a pall over what had been a comfortable harbor for the city’s middle class since the complexes opened in the late 1940s.

“It worries me,” said Anne Granberry, a nurse who moved into Stuyvesant Town in June. “They haven’t told us anything.”
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The city's major brokerages reported prices in the fourth quarter of 2009 in the Manhattan real estate market decreased from a year ago while sales increased. I expect this trend to continue into early 2010.

Prudential Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel reported that the median sales price of an apartment in the fourth quarter of 2009 was $810,000, down 10 percent compared to a year ago. There were 2,473 transactions, up 8.4 percent compared to last year, and 11 percent compared to last quarter. The activity is more than double the 1,195 transactions in the first quarter of 2009. Average price-per-square-foot was $1,176, flat compared to a year ago.

Brown Harris Stevens and Halstead, both o...Read More| Post a comment

CONDOS
Buying a condo is like a buying a single-family home that sits inside a building. You own the apartment plus a percentage of the building’s common areas.

Condo buildings have monthly “common charges” to cover building-wide services (management, door staff, plumbing, roofing, common walls) but these charges are usually much smaller than co-op maintenance charges.

Condo buildings have associations but they cannot veto sales or rentals-making condos very attractive to investors.

Condos are usually more expensive than co-ops; there are fewer of them and there’s a high demand. Lending banks are lenient about condo buildings – if you borrow 75% or less of the price of your condo, a lender won’t review the building’s finances, and all banks accept completed condo buildings that are 90% occupied. Since a co...Read More| Post a comment

There is an old expression, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Our experience has taught us that people who do their homework by spending time familiarizing themselves with the rental process beforehand, and making the necessary preparations, have the most success and the easiest time.

There are two crucial steps of preparation. The first is gathering the proper documentation. Many people have missed an opportunity to live in their dream apartment because time was wasted chasing down the proper paperwork. The other crucial step is discussing your financial and pet situation with your agent. Time and energy will be wasted if, for example, a bad credit history or a 75-pound dog is not brought to your agent’s attention from the beginning.

Whether applying for an apartment in a rental, co-op or condo b...Read More| Post a comment

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Our staff worked hard to make site 100% free as well as modifying the News and Announcements page to protect the site from spam.

What visitors should can expect:

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Keep checking back soon to see all the exciting changes!

Regards,
Staff @ rateyourbroker.com