Appraiser values below-grade space as amenity

Apartment at grade on Upper West Side is typical of units in other buildings.

One of the hardest components when trying to price an apartment going on the market is space at ground level or below it.

Jonathan Miller, the inimitable CEO of the Miller Samuel appraisal firm, has published a blog post that makes the challenging task understandable.

Inside view of the same co-op at front of the building in photo at left.

He writes convincingly about the definition of spaces ranging from “at grade” (ground level) to “sub-cellar” (below the cellar, which itself is below the basement) and approaches for considering square footage as well as value. 

Our housing market is undergoing major change

Inventory has nowhere to go but up, but don’t expect a surge. Click to expand. (Source: Miller Samuel Inc.)

The word all of us have been using to describe the housing market in Manhattan is “stable.”

Well, as any prospective buyer of a well-priced apartment will tell you, much of the market has changed in a big way.  Open houses of new listings are jammed, and that is just part of the evidence.

The chief reason is inventory that is sharply down from previous years.

Respected appraiser/data hound Jonathan Miller has pulled together some astounding numbers. 

Don’t try this at home: analyzing comparables

The field-emission environmental scanning electron microscope (SEM) is a state-of-the-art instrument at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) that scientists use to examine aerosols and other samples. The samples can be studied using a field-emission source electron beam both in standard SEM and environmental modes of operation. (Flickr photo by EMSL)

Any seller can wish for a high price for the property about to be listed.

And any broker can guess at the right offering price.

That’s asking for trouble.

The truth is,

Homeowners who bought in 2007 should be celebrating, not crying over spilled milk

Condo and co-op sales (source: Prudential Douglas Elliman via the Real Deal)

Note: With my break drawing to a close, alas, normal frequency of posts resumes Monday.

Let’s say you bought a new home five years ago, a year before Manhattan’s residential market nosedived.

And let’s assume you coughed up $1 million for the privilege of living in your modest 870-sf apartment with two small bedrooms plus one and a half baths on the Upper West Side.

The third set of assumptions might be monthly mortgage payments of $3,500, maintenance of $1,400 and other ownership expenses such as insurance and maintenance of $100 a month.

Do you wish that you had waited until now to have made the purchase?

If you are like many other former homebuyers,

Crystal balls consulted on Manhattan real estate

Panel on the Future of Residential Real Estate at New York Law School

Manhattan’s residential real estate market will continue to elude the magnitude of the problems of the rest of the nation during 2012, panelists assembled by New York Law School concurred this week.

But the participants — who included Curbed founder Lockhart Steele and brokerage executive Diane Ramirez — grappled with the question of why our housing market isn’t booming.

Noting limited inventory, real estate attorney Stuart Saft of the Dewey & LeBoeuf firm the told room full of lawyers and real estate professionals

Jonathan Miller worried about falling inventory

Jonathan Miller

You can count on appraisal executive Jonathan Miller to provide an informed perspective on both the U.S. and local housing markets.

A post of his this week on an abnormally low number of listings in the U.S. was no exception.  (We’re down in Manhattan, too.)

Although others have maintained that declining inventory has been a positive development that was sure to result in stabilizing and then rising prices, Miller contends that the opposite is true.  Says he:

A bombshell calling ‘the bottom’ lands online

Housing starts (Click to expand via Calculated Risk)

Bill McBride, who is a highly respected blogger on finance and economics, lobbed a bombshell the other day that has been predictably controversial.

On CalculatedRisk.com — which I check two or three times a day for his latest news, information and insights on real estate — the full-time blogger declared the following:

The Housing Bottom Is Here

He contended that

I purchased my UWS co-op close to market’s peak

My living room.  (That’s sorely missed Sophie near the table.)

Looking at the recent 10-year report prepared by appraisal heavy Jonathan Miller, I once again considered whether buying my apartment in 2007 was a mistake.

As you can see from glancing at Miller’s charts below, I purchased my co-op on Manhattan’s Upper West Side close to the decade’s price peak in 2008.  Of course, after Lehman Brothers imploded on Sept. 15, 2008, prices plummeted along with sales activity.

Click to expand. (Charts via Prudential Douglas Elliman)

There’s little point in providing the purchase price, but

Why is ‘boring’ housing market’s Q3 catchword?

(Courtesy of Prudential Douglas Elliman via Curbed)

Executives of the largest brokerages and those who craft reports on Manhattan’s housing market kept using “stable” to describe the second quarter.

For the third quarter, a word I’m seeing — as you doubtless are as well — is “boring.”

The term arises from some, though not all of the statistics. I’ve also noticed an attempt at “normal.”

I’m not so sure.  Variable?  Confusing? Troubling?

The Big Apple: Rentals hot, Hamptons too. More!

Employment posts gain in June, but jobless rate continues to stall

The city’s unemployment rate in June went to 8.7 percent from May’s 8.6 percent, the state Department of Labor reported.

The one-month rise was not itself a significant increase, but after falling consistently each month for nearly a year starting last spring, there have now been four consecutive months without a noticeable decline in the city’s jobless rate.

Most of the drop in the rate from its 10 percent peak has come not from significant job gains but as a result of discouraged job seekers leaving the work force.

The city added 51,400 private sector jobs in the 12 months ending in June. The 1.6 percent growth rate, “is pretty good by historical standards,” according to James Brown, principal economist at the labor department.

Rental rigmarole challenges prospective tenants

With a vacancy rate in Manhattan of under 1 percent, apartments sometimes rent in hours, not days or weeks. Good tenants are not that hard to find. On top of that, evicting problem tenants can be expensive and time-consuming.

So, as the New York Times observes, most landlords here require a lot of information.

They want to see a prospective tenant’s tax returns, pay stubs, bank statements, proof of employment, photo identification and, sometimes, reference letters from previous landlords.

Everyone will run a credit check (many Manhattan landlords look for a score above 700) and just about all, from big management firms to small-time landlords, want to know that your gross income is somewhere between 40 and 50 times the monthly rent.

Luxury sales in the East End