Home Equity

Home Equity Loans: The Three-Day Cancellation Rule -- Search: FTC Consumer Alert PDF Version Home Equity Loans: The Three-Day Cancellation Rule If you’re considering applying for a personal loan and using your home to guarantee repayment, you should know that a federal credit law gives you three days to reconsider a signed credit agreement and cancel the deal without penalty. Your "right to rescind" or "right to cancel" is guaranteed by the Truth In Lending Act. You can rescind for any reason but only if you are using your principal residence—whether it is a condominium, mobile home, or house boat—as collateral, not a vacation or second home. Under the right to rescind, you have until midnight of the third business day to cancel the credit transaction. Day one begins after all three of the following occur: you sign the credit contract; you receive a Truth in Lending disclosure form containing certain key information about the credit contract, including the annual percentage rate; finance charge; amount financed; and payment schedule; and you receive two copies of a Truth in Lending notice explaining your right to rescind. For rescission purposes, business days include Saturdays but not Sundays or legal public holidays. For example, if the events listed above take place on a Friday, you have until midnight on the next Tuesday to rescind. During this waiting period, activity related to the contract cannot take place. The creditor may not deliver the money for the loan. If you’re dealing with a home improvement loan, the contractor may not deliver any materials or start work. If you decide to rescind, you must notify the creditor in writing. You may not rescind by telephone or in a face-to-face conversation with the creditor. Your written notice must be mailed, filed for telegraphic transmission, or delivered if by other written means, before midnight of the third business day. If you cancel the contract, the security interest in your home is also cancelled, and you are not liable for any amount, including the finance charge. The creditor has 20 days to return all money or property you paid as part of the transaction and release any security interest in your home. If you received money or property from the creditor, you may retain it until the creditor shows that your home is no longer being used as collateral and returns any money you have paid. Then, you must offer to return the creditor’s money or property. If the creditor does not claim the money or property within 20 days, you may keep it. If you have a bona fide personal financial emergency—such as damage to your home from a storm or other natural disaster—the law allows you to waive your right to rescind and eliminate the three-day period. To waive your right, you must give the creditor your own written statement describing the emergency and stating that you are waiving your right to rescind. The statement must be dated and signed by you and anyone else who shares in ownership of the home. But remember: if you waive your right to rescind, you must go ahead with the transaction. The right to rescind does not apply in all situations when you are using your home for collateral. Among the exceptions are: when you apply for a loan to buy or build your principal residence; when you refinance your loan with the same creditor who holds your loan and you don’t borrow any additional funds; or when a state agency is the creditor for a loan. In these situations, you may have other cancellation rights under state or local law. The FTC works for the consumer to prevent fraudulent, deceptive and unfair business practices in the marketplace and to provide information to help consumers spot, stop, and avoid them. To file a complaint or to get free information on consumer issues , visit www.ftc.gov or call toll-free, 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357); TTY: 1-866-653-4261. The FTC enters Internet, telemarketing, identity theft, and other fraud-related complaints into Consumer Sentinel , a secure, online database available to hundreds of civil and criminal law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad. May 1998

Investment Property With full

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Real Estate Prices

CNN/Money: The hottest zip codes Web CNN/Money Buying & Selling Investment Property Home Improvement Million $ Life Financing Best Places This year's hottest zip codes By Sarah Max, CNN/Money senior staff writer PLUS: • What makes a zip code HOT? • Homes in hot zip codes • Ultimate home guide 2005 SALEM, Ore. (CNN/Money) - Whether home prices will rise or fall in the coming year is anyone's guess. The housing market continues to stump experts on both sides of the bubble debate. Even so, economists at Fiserv Case Shiller Weiss think they have a pretty good idea what's in the cards for most metros in 2005. Their prediction: Los Angeles will fizzle. Miami will sizzle. There's some reason to believe them. Fiserv CSW has been forecasting annual home-price growth at the metro level for more than a decade, with a not-too-shabby record: the group's median forecast error is less than 2 percent. To track housing performance, the researchers look at repeat sales data for a sample of houses in each zip code, a method they consider more accurate than simply looking at changes in an area's median home price. They also consider past price changes, employment trends and interest-rate trends to devise a forecast for the coming year. Finally, they make adjustments to individual areas to account for other factors that could influence an area's housing market. What's up in L.A.? Over the past five years home prices in the Los Angeles area appreciated 125 percent, with prices in a handful of zip codes up nearly 200 percent. But Fiserv CSW is predicting that prices in the greater Los Angeles area will increase by only 5.8 percent in 2005, with slightly better appreciation in some L.A. markets and price declines in others. "There is anecdotal evidence that the market there is weakening," said David Stiff, a senior economist with Case Shiller Weiss. "It hasn't worked its way into our model yet." For that reason, the firm declined to give a forecast for individual zip codes in Los Angeles. "We are very uncertain about what will happen to home prices in Los Angeles this year," Stiff added. Miami's market, however, may still have room to grow. Home prices in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metro have doubled over the last five years, and Fiserv CSW is forecasting that they will appreciate another 16.4 percent this year. "Unlike L.A., Miami has a higher ceiling [for price appreciation] because affordability is less of an issue," said Stiff. What's the forecast for your hood? For each of the 10 largest metro regions tracked by Fiserv Case Shiller Weiss, here are the 10 zip codes with the largest median five-year price increases -- and their prospects for the coming year. Data on five-year price change are through the fourth quarter of 2004, while the forecasted change is for the first quarter of 2005 through the first quarter of 2006. Click on column headings to re-sort » Metro Area Median price 5-Yr Price Change 1 Forecasted change 2 Boston 338,000 73.60% 8.00% Lawrence MA 01841 226,000 121.10% 9.90% New Bedford MA 02744 207,000 120.50% 9.60% New Bedford MA 02740 225,000 118.10% 9.80% Worcester MA 01610 193,000 116.30% 16.20% Fairhaven MA 02719 254,000 113.50% 9.80% New Bedford MA 02745 245,000 112.30% 11.10% Wareham MA 02571 260,500 111.50% 8.20% Manchester NH 03102 242,000 111.10% 10.80% North Dartmouth MA 02747 324,500 110.90% 10.90% Mattapoisett MA 02739 353,500 110.70% 9.80% Chicago 254,000 49.60% 8.30% Chicago IL 60632 205,000 91.20% 13.80% Chicago IL 60638 237,000 90.90% 15.30% Chicago IL 60629 195,000 89.90% 16.70% Chicago IL 60652 180,000 84.60% 16.00% Chicago IL 60639 265,000 84.10% 11.20% Chicago IL 60630 318,000 83.30% 12.20% Chicago IL 60634 300,000 83.20% 12.50% Chicago IL 60640 511,000 82.20% 12.50% Oak Park IL 60302 450,000 80.50% 8.80% Chicago IL 60641 320,000 79.80% 11.10% Detroit 156,000 23.50% 4.50% Inkster MI 48141 85,000 39.80% 3.80% Pontiac MI 48342 75,000 37.90% 3.30% Mount Clemens MI 48043 136,000 35.90% NA Romulus MI 48174 145,000 35.80% 3.40% Dearborn Heights MI 48125 110,000 35.60% 3.40% Center Line MI 48015 125,000 35.60% 5.50% Ann Arbor MI 48103 263,000 35.50% 2.90% Detroit MI 48223 75,000 35.30% 2.00% Ann Arbor MI 48104 314,000 35.00% 1.30% Detroit MI 48235 97,000 34.30% 2.00% Los Angeles 418,000 125.70% 5.80% Rialto CA 92376 270,000 191.90% NA Littlerock CA 93543 230,000 185.80% NA Fontana CA 92335 272,000 184.70% NA Mira Loma CA 91752 449,000 182.50% NA Burbank CA 91502 677,500 180.50% NA Glendale CA 91203 538,000 180.40% NA Inglewood CA 90305 425,000 176.60% NA Santa Ana CA 92707 475,000 176.10% NA Riverside CA 92509 325,000 174.70% NA Inglewood CA 90303 390,000 173.80% NA Miami 246,000 106.00% 16.40% Miami FL 33137 265,000 171.30% NA Miami FL 33138 360,000 161.40% NA Miami FL 33150 142,000 147.80% 21.80% Fort Lauderdale FL 33311 175,000 134.50% 19.90% Pompano Beach FL 33062 355,000 133.00% 20.00% Deerfield Beach FL 33441 253,000 130.70% 17.10% Fort Lauderdale FL 33314 175,000 128.40% 22.80% Hollywood FL 33020 204,000 128.30% NA Pompano Beach FL 33064 171,000 126.90% 21.50% Miami FL 33179 169,000 125.50% 18.20% New York 360,000 87.50% 11.90% Beach Haven NJ 08008 687,500 146.00% 14.30% Tuckerton NJ 08087 216,000 134.50% 13.70% Mastic Beach NY 11951 228,000 130.20% NA Manorville NY 11949 392,000 128.80% 16.30% Brielle NJ 08730 519,000 127.70% 11.70% Bellport NY 11713 158,000 127.50% NA Mastic NY 11950 239,500 127.20% 17.10% Lavallette NJ 08735 557,500 127.00% 12.90% Perth Amboy NJ 08861 260,000 126.90% 13.00% Waretown NJ 08758 350,000 125.60% 15.50% Philadelphia 199,000 71.00% 11.40% Brigantine NJ 08203 358,500 149.50% 15.40% Sea Isle City NJ 08243 699,000 136.50% 20.10% Ocean City NJ 08226 650,000 133.80% 18.50% Ventnor City NJ 08406 285,000 132.20% 18.50% Villas NJ 08251 167,500 124.40% 20.60% Margate City NJ 08402 549,000 122.70% 17.10% Ocean View NJ 08230 325,000 118.50% 15.30% Northfield NJ 08225 207,500 117.30% 15.60% Marmora NJ 08223 265,000 116.50% 16.00% Somers Point NJ 08244 225,500 111.50% 16.00% San Francisco 576,000 82.00% 14.40% Vallejo CA 94590 361,000 149.00% 16.90% Oakland CA 94621 310,000 144.20% 15.00% Dixon CA 95620 448,000 140.70% 16.10% Fairfield CA 94533 367,000 137.00% 18.00% Vallejo CA 94589 370,000 135.70% 17.80% Oakland CA 94603 326,500 135.70% 15.30% Suisun City CA 94585 380,000 131.50% 17.20% Oakley CA 94561 400,500 130.20% 21.40% Pittsburg CA 94565 389,000 129.90% 20.10% Vacaville CA 95687 391,500 129.70% 14.80% Seattle 289,000 38.50% 10.10% Seattle WA 98126 294,000 57.80% 10.30% Seattle WA 98106 233,000 53.40% 12.30% Seattle WA 98109 556,000 53.00% 11.40% Seattle WA 98107 362,000 52.50% 9.50% Seattle WA 98117 380,000 52.40% 8.40% Seattle WA 98103 399,000 52.30% 8.90% Seattle WA 98199 510,000 51.10% 8.20% Seattle WA 98116 389,000 51.10% 8.10% Seattle WA 98105 441,000 50.60% 6.90% Seattle WA 98168 229,000 48.80% 9.00% Washington, D.C. 335,000 99.00% 14.90% Gaithersburg MD 20877 329,000 127.40% 14.30% Germantown MD 20874 291,000 117.80% 16.00% Silver Spring MD 20903 340,000 116.90% 12.40% Gaithersburg MD 20879 309,000 115.90% 13.70% Rockville MD 20851 320,000 112.50% 9.30% Silver Spring MD 20910 450,000 112.00% 8.70% Gaithersburg MD 20878 485,500 112.00% 10.60% Rockville MD 20853 400,000 111.10% 12.30% Rockville MD 20850 523,000 109.80% 9.30% Silver Spring MD 20901 365,000 109.60% 12.50% Notes: 1 Q4 1999 through Q4 2004 2 Q1 2005 through Q1 2006 Source: Fiserv CSW «top» The Hot List Most profitable renovations How risky is your 401(k)? 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real estate prices in

MemeFirst: New York real-estate prices explained -- MemeFirst December 01, 2005 New York real-estate prices explained The 2.2 million jobs in Manhattan pay, on average, $2,025 per week . (You know that feeling you get when you find out you're below average? I've been having that for years.) Manhattan is 22 square miles, which means that the island of Manhattan pays, on average, $378 per square foot per year . And that includes Washington Heights. Posted by Felix at 02:54 PM GMT All proceeds go to MSF -- Comments #1 Pity we can't all work for Goldman Sachs. Posted by: Gherimiah on December 1, 2005 03:28 PM #2 I'll happily defer to someone with a firmer grasp of stats on this, but in the meantime, I wonder, does that average income number tell you very much? Given the massive disparity in Manhattan incomes, between, say, the dishwasher and the hedge-fund owner, which surely are among the widest in the country, wouldn't you also need to know the distribution of the data points? At a minium, wouldn't you want also to know the median income? Also, is this net or gross? Article talked about paychecks, which could probably mean either. Posted by: Matthew on December 1, 2005 04:36 PM #3 Oh, and also, Felix, presumably the 2.2 million people with jobs in Manhattan don't all live there, so your extrapolation doesn't wash. Posted by: Matthew on December 1, 2005 04:38 PM #4 Obvs mean incomemedian income, and I'd be surprised if more than 40% of Manhattanites made above average. Probably less. But even so. And actually, the fact that there are 2.2 million jobs to 1.5 million people in Manhattan actually only serves to exacerbate the demand-supply imbalance when it comes to real estate. Posted by: Felix on December 1, 2005 04:53 PM #5 I hate to be the one to break this to you, Felix, but nearly all residential housing in Manhattan consists of multi-story buildings. The salary range you describe explains real estate prices in Westchester County, NY and Bergen County, NJ to about the same degree as prices in Manhattan. Posted by: Sterling on December 1, 2005 07:05 PM #6 How delightful that the discussion of property prices one is sometimes unable to defuse at dinner parties just carries on here - almost as if taunting one with its dreary ineluctability. And how nice that Felix should bring along his no doubt expert appreciation of statistical lore. The one thing I am missing is the crucial evaluation of bedbug incidence as it affects property prices in Manhattan. In another thread, Betty has said this bedbug malarkey is all a plan of Bush's. For myself, I prefer to recall that bedbugs tend to originate in Belgium. Schtumm for now. More on this later. Posted by: Claude de Bigny on December 1, 2005 08:40 PM #7 Also, this seems to imply that everyone pays all of their income for housing, which is hopefully not the case. To be more realistic (ignoring the issues rightly brought up by the other commentators, including whether all of those people actually live in Manhattan and whether you can just take the sq ftge of Manhattan as the residential sq ftge), say people on average spend 40% of their income on housing. That gets your income for housing per sq ft to around $151. Posted by: Susan on December 1, 2005 09:14 PM #8 Susan and Sterling, you are embarassingly confused. What percentage of real estate in Manhattan is used for housing? According to this http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/landusefacts/landuse_tables.pdf (in case you are confused by the graph, the percents sum together veritcally and the land area sum horizontally). And even assuming that all "Mixed Residential and Commercial" was used for housing, less than 38% of the land in Manhattan is for housing. These data certainly allow for the idea that much of rent paid in Manhattan is for commercial use, and even then, a considerable percent is used for public space (Central Park alone is 10% of the area of Manhattan). Anyway, the amount people earn in a particular location is not directly related to the amount the people who live there earn, or the amount the people live there pay for rent. Look at this site: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/saipe/index.html The direct link is unavailable, but the Median household income for New York County was 43,573. Nassau County on the other hand is more than 71,000. In which place is it cheaper to rent by the foot? Posted by: Andrew on December 2, 2005 07:22 AM #9 I don't think I'm confused. My points are: a) there is actually quite a bit more than 22 square miles of residential floor space in Manhattan because of vertical construction b) a lot of upper-income Manhattan workers live outside Manhattan, and their buying power lifts prices in tony bedroom communities Posted by: Sterling on December 3, 2005 03:38 PM #10 OK, Sterling, let's do it your way. Assume that each of the 1.5 million residents of Manhattan has 400 square feet to call their own: that works out to 1200 square feet for the average family of three and 1600 square feet for the average family of four. Generous, I'd say. That comes out to 600 million square feet of residential real estate in Manhattan. Using that figure, my calculation actually comes out slightly higher : $386 per square foot per year, rather than $378. What makes you think that there's more than 22 square miles of residential floor space in Manhattan? As for your point b, I fail to see how it is in any way germane. Posted by: Felix on December 3, 2005 11:09 PM #11 OK, 22 square miles equals about 613,324,800 square feet. That would leave each of Manhattan's 1.5 million residents with 409 square feet of living space. But I don't believe that most Manhattan residents are actually so deprived, especially when you take into account common areas in apartment buildings such as laundry facilities, hallways, lobbies, etc. I'd be surprised if the average wasn't at least 600, and it's probably more than 800. And besides, that's not what you originally meant - you were dividing Manhattan's land footprint and not taking into account its vertical expansion. As for the second point, I suspect there's a strong tendency among $100,000 - $1,000,000 per annum Manhattan earners - which is well-off to wealthy-on-a-budget - to live in places like Valhalla and Ho-Ho-Kus, especially if they're married with kids. Family-flight in turn increases the average per-capita-square-footage of the Manhattan residential footprint through bleed-off of children. Posted by: Sterling on December 4, 2005 02:29 AM #12 Sterling jumped the shark so long ago it's probably not surprising, but for those of you keeping score at home, he really did just say that the average Manhattanite has 800 square feet of their own. So if you're an average person living with 2 roommates, that means you're in a 2400 square foot apartment. In Manhattan. Yeah. Oh, and that 350 square foot apartment you've got? It's not 350 square feet at all, it's probably more than 4000 square feet. You're just not including the lobby and all the hallways. Posted by: Felix on December 4, 2005 02:43 AM #13 My claim is that the amount of residential-zoned floor space in Manhattan probably works out to between 600 and 800 square feet per resident of Manhattan. You're not only challenging this, but asserting that my claim is absurd. Sure you wanna do that? Posted by: Sterling on December 4, 2005 02:59 AM #14 I've tried to find the statistic, but to no avail. It seems that while office space inventor is measured in square footage, residential space is simply measured, in all documents, by units. But we can work with that. So far I've learned that 82% of zoned lots in Manhattan are residential, making up about 280,000,000 square feet, which includes permanently undeveloped spaces like yards and gardens. If the average height of development across all that land is four stories, then, we're looking at about 750 square feet per person. I've also learned that in 1999 there were about 727,000 residential units in Manhattan , which means that the average unit houses two people. So those three-roomies crammed into one 800-square-foot-tenement-with-the-bathtub-in-the-kitchen examples are mostly fiction. Which is a shame because I get a tingle from the mental picture of Manhattan twenty- and thirty-somethings living in cramped, dingy conditions. If we divide the total residential land area by the total number of units, we get 385 square feet, which works out to 192.5 square feet per person, assuming no dwellings above one story in height and no unimproved/vacant land. If the average height is assumed to be four stories, in this scenario we get about 770 square feet per person. Here's a report from Prudential Douglas Elliman that details its 1Q 2005 sales. Units sold averaged 1,334 square feet, which divided by two yields 767 square feet per person. Breaking it down further we find co-ops averaging 1,197 square feet, condos at 1,496 square feet, luxury at 2,921 and loft at 2,145. So that's 598.5 square feet per person at the low end all the way up to 1,460.5 at the top. There's three separate analytical models for you Felix, all of which yield per-person square footage of 750 or better. I admit they're not all that fleshed out, but I'm stuck inside with a cold watching The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three on DVD, and I'm disinclined to dig deeper. But you're welcome to. Posted by: Sterling on December 4, 2005 04:04 AM #15 Sterling: do your calculations include infrastructure or is the 280MM number a percentage of raw space? Building density is higher here than anywhere else in America, but 15% to circulation (in buildings and streets themeselves) would be an easily defended metric. Counting hallways in urban residential structures is like counting sidewalks as part of sf for suburban homes. As much Sterling does sound like a set designer for Friends, Felix, I gotta say, of the 25 or so apartments of people that I can definitely make an estimate of size, we average 500 sf easy. Most everyone is a half a standard tenement lot (25 x 25), with a couple of lofts and post-war, large-scale developments thrown in. This is skewed because many of them are single (I live in a 2bd alone) or have rent-controlled apartments from way back. Posted by: 99 on December 4, 2005 07:19 PM #16 Where does your 280m sq ft number come from? Your first two calculations are based on it, so I'd like to know. (They're also based on a multiplier of 4, which as far as I can tell came pretty much out of thin air.) As for apartment sales, in Manhattan individual condos and coops tend to be much larger than the apartments inside rental buildings. So if you look just at sold apartments as opposed to rented apartments, you're going to get a skewed figure. What's more, if a 3800-square-foot brownstone in Harlem, say, is sold and then the downstairs floor is rented out, that still counts as a 3800 square foot deal under these figures. Posted by: Felix on December 4, 2005 09:21 PM #17 The multiplier of 4 was back-of-envelope guess. The 280,000,000 number came from this PDF . Sorry, thought I'd linked to it initially. As for rental apartments being smaller than privately owned condos or co-ops...not sure I buy that. But even if it's true, how much smaller could they be? 10%? Doesn't really matter. You can apologize any time now. Posted by: Sterling on December 4, 2005 10:06 PM #18 if anyone is real curious why not pony up the $250 to get a list of every tax lot in the city? http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/bytes/applbyte.shtml in the meantime, simply because i am tired of having to read sterlings pontifications about things he knows anything about, i downloaded a list of all the residential tax lots from 14th street and below from propertyshark. only 14th street and below, because after 6000+ entries, i became bored. 14th street down is a good representative sample of the 99000+ residential tax lots in manhattan. it includes spacious luxury lofts of tribeca, tenements of the les, projects on the eastside, high rise high density battery park and half building condo conversions of downtown (note that a rental bldg with multiple units counts as a single tax lot with the number of units listed as a seperate data field). the average unit size works out to 1100sf with 590sf per person (based 2000 census population stats for 14th st & below). this includes all common space in a building as it is based on total building size for single tax lot (rental) buildings and counts common space tax lots for condo buildings (read lobbies, circ, etc.) multiplying back out by the 2000 census population numbers for manhattan of 1,537,195... we get 906,945,050sf of residential space in manhattan. let's call that an even 9Bsf since the city lists 3800 acres of lot area in manhattan (165,500,000sf), that gives a rough overbuild factor of 5.5. this will obviously skew higher with the ues & uws densities without actually affecting the sf/person. summary- -590sf of residential per person (inclusive of common areas). close to sterlings low estimate of 600, but nowhere near the 800sf -1100sf average size per unit (inclusive of common areas). again close to sterlings guess based on broker mumbojumbo, but still below the stated average. -9Bsf of residential space in manhattan sterling- close on your numbers, but not nearly close enough to be quite so pompously smug. stick to things you know about, like why bush is a foreign policy genius. felix- remind me what this related to? Posted by: geoff on December 5, 2005 12:34 AM #19 Geoff - The only reason I was pompously snug is because Felix had reacted to to my estimates with such comedic outrage. Also, I don't think 14th St. and below is a good representative sample. Newer and I suspect more spacious high-rises make up a much larger proportion of housing from the 30s up through the low 100s. So I'm sticking with 600+. I suspect the actual number is around 750, as stated above. As for your justification of your work - "simply because i am tired of having to read sterlings pontifications about things he knows anything about" - I'm not sure what it means. Perhaps you meant to write "nothing" instead of "anything"? I'm not claiming to be right all the time - I am not right all the time. I am, however, pretty much always right whenever Felix gets all worked up and tells me I have no idea what I'm talking about. Thanks for your small role in marking off another example for me to throw back at him at some future date. Posted by: Sterling on December 5, 2005 06:19 AM #20 Renter-occupied apartments are much smaller than owner-occupied apartments. And as the PDF you yourself linked to shows (see page 24), the vast majority of apartments in Manhattan are renter-occupied. Think about it: one needs maybe 350 sq ft per person to live in some reasonable comfort. Beyond that, you're shelling out extra cash for extra space. Owners are happy doing that because they have 100% equity in that space: everyone has heard the advice that they should buy the biggest apartment they can afford. Renters, on the other hand, are simply giving away thousands of dollars in rent every month, with nothing at all to show for it. So they tend to go not for the biggest apartment they can afford, but rather the cheapest apartment they find adequate. Put it this way: Manhattan is full of individuals spending an enormous proportion of their income on outsize mortgage payments. Almost everyone, when they move from renting to buying, sees their monthly housing costs rise substantially. If you move to Manhattan and have a relatively low income, then you might spend a crazy amount of it on rent, it's true. But if your income is average or higher (and remember that average is $2,025 per week), I very much doubt that your rent is making nearly as much of a dent in your paycheck as it would if you owned your own apartment. You reach a standard of living you're comfortable with, and you stop. Anything beyond that is money which you could otherwise spend on clothes, or travel, or restaurants. Whereas if you buy , you're not spending so much as investing. The only money which you're really spending is the interest on your mortgage -- and even that comes with a tax deduction. Or let's put it another way. That Elliman report you linked to has an average sales price of $1.21 million. A typical rental yield in Manhattan these days is 4%, so if rentals were functionally identical to owner-occupied apartments, which you seem to assume, then the average rent in Manhattan would be over $4,000 a month. In fact, of course, it's nowhere near that. Posted by: Felix on December 5, 2005 06:55 AM #21 There's the shark, and then there's the A train. Sterling's Manhattan clearly stops at 96th street. Sterling, dear, north of that bright white line, the housing stock is incredibly stable and consistent in terms of size and layout. Harlem is just now getting it's first 'luxury' apartment building in a half century. Any larger apartment complexes are housing projects, which have smaller units by definition, and, allowing for the dispersal of the towers in some International Style fantasy also insures that the density does not increase much. Posted by: 99 on December 5, 2005 04:03 PM #22 Felix, just because apartments are currently going for $1.21 million a pop doesn't mean that everyone who owns an apartment paid that much. Rent prices move in sympathy with real estate prices but are less prone to bubbles. What you're missing here, and you've missed the same thing when we've talked about the stock market in the past, is the difference between speculative investors and income investors. Speculators don't buy an apartment (or apartment building) primarily for the benefit of the rent; their main motivation is the hope of flipping the property at some later date for a larger sum than they paid for it. The current Manhattan real estate bubble is the product of speculators. Real estate income investors view rent collection as their goal - most apartment buildings in any town or city in the U.S. are owned by income investors. They get less press than speculators, but they also tend to go bankrupt less often. The market value of a rental property can be determined by the amount of rent it generates for the owner, not the other way around. Manhattan rents are high - probably even ludicrously high - but that is a function of large demand chasing relatively low supply, and is only weakly related to current real estate prices. I do acknowledge your point about space not being a priority for Manhattan renters, there is some truth in that. People who do see space as a necessity tend to wind up in rental units in Brooklyn, Queens or Hudson County. But that's not exclusively the case. Posted by: Sterling on December 5, 2005 04:59 PM #23 This thread is hilarious and sad, although a good example of how the same statistics can be applied to support any and all political positions. Posted by: sac on December 5, 2005 06:39 PM #24 Sterling, Manhattan is the one real-estate market in the US where there are, to all intents and purposes, zero speculators under your definition. No one buys Manhattan property in order to flip it. For one thing, co-op boards (and even condo boards, for that matter) hate flippers, and are likely to punish them. There's flip taxes, brokers' fees of 6% for the seller, and a luxury tax of 1% on any apartment over $1m for the buyer. Prices are so high that the carrying costs are enormous -- and you can't rent out the apartment in the meantime, because that makes it pretty much unsaleable. There are, of course, lots of buildings owned by income investors in New York. Most of the East Village, where I live, is comprised of such buildings: they normally have 20 or so apartments (say 5 floors, 4 apartments per floor), and they've been going up in price almost as much as individual apartments have -- the only reason they haven't gone up just as much is because many of the tenants are rent-controlled or rent-stabilised below market. These are typical New York apartments, from a renter's point of view -- but I can tell you, as someone who was apartment hunting in the East Village for almost a year, they're much less typical from an owner's point of view. Also, there's a strong incentive for for-sale apartments to be as large as possible: price per square foot is positively correlated with size. That's not the case in the rental market: it's easier to rent out a 650sqft apartment for $2500 than it is to rent out a 1300sqft apartment for $5000. Posted by: Felix on December 5, 2005 09:14 PM #25 "Manhattan is the one real-estate market in the US where there are, to all intents and purposes, zero speculators under your definition. No one buys Manhattan property in order to flip it." Felix, of course people speculate on property in Manhattan. Just because the barriers to entry are high doesn't mean some won't jump them. How else do you think a modest apartment winds up costing as much as a dozen Mercedes-Benz CL500s? Who do you imagine is providing demand at that level? You know banks are not issuing $1,000,000 mortgages to households with joint incomes of $200,000. It's trust fund kiddies - who are often divorced from fiscal reality - and speculators. As for your point about different-sized apartments being suitable for rent versus sale, I might agree with you except for the fact that every rental apartment IS OWNED by someone. It IS PART of the for sale market. I'd be surprised if fewer than half of the condos in Manhattan are rented out by their owners. Posted by: Sterling on December 6, 2005 01:51 AM #26 Sterling, I'm afraid the factors leading to high apartment prices are much more mundane than your feverish mind would like to imagine. Lots of global liquidity, driving down interest rates and banks' credit tests. Lots of demand, due to Manhattan's status as the center of the universe and high Wall Street bonuses. And very limited supply. The market for flippers is Miami, not NYC -- where a condo can be bought and sold three or four times before it is even built. As for your point about rental apartments being owned by someone, it sounds clever until you stop to think about what I've already said. Rental buildings are owned by landlords; the vast majority of condos and co-ops are owner-occupied. For one thing, co-ops vastly outnumber condos, and they're hard to rent. And as for condos, they generally get rented out when they're not the place their owner really wants to live. Given how valuable they are, few owners who don't want to live here would rather rent out their condos rather than simply sell them. Take my East Village condo building, for instance: when it went condo in 1983, only one owner lived here. Today, all the units bar one are owner-occupied. I haven't done my homework on this, but I'll happily accept your wager: I'll bet the standard bottle of vintage champagne that more than half the condos in Manhattan are owner-occupied. Deal? Posted by: Felix on December 6, 2005 02:43 AM #27 If you go double or nothing on the proposition that the amount of existing residential floor space in Manhattan divided by the number of residents of Manhattan is equal to or greater than 600 sq. ft., then it's a bet. How are we going to research this? FWIW, I am descended from a man who is reputed to be the first person to negotiate a real estate deal in New York: Wessel Wesselse (ten Broek). He may have been the man to offer 60 guilders (often misreported as $24) as the purchase price of Manhattan from the Canarsies. (Technically the Canarsies didn't own Manhattan Island - it's not for nothing that "Canarsie" is in Brooklyn. Also technically the Dutch West India Company didn't care which tribe owned it. It just needed some bunch of natives to smile and sign off on the deal to keep the English away.) This of course conveys no special knowledge upon me, but it certainly adds a humorous subtext to our disagreement. Posted by: Sterling on December 6, 2005 04:14 AM #28 I'm not sure about the terms of the wager: we seem to be betting on two different things at the same time. But spell it out, and I'll be amenable. I do want to ensure, of course, that hallways and elevator shafts and the like do not count as residential floor space. And please also ensure that if one of the propositions can be determined while the other one can't, then the other wager still stands. Posted by: Felix on December 6, 2005 05:55 AM #29 I'm not sure how we could specify the terms to exclude elevators if they are included in filings. However, it occurs to me that Manhattan Borough probably requires a statement of total dwelling space for its Certificate of Occupancy, so that would work for me. And no, I think double or nothing sounds good to me, especially since we will be attempting to falsify two of my estimations, rather than either of yours. Posted by: Sterling on December 6, 2005 06:20 AM #30 You've lost me, I'm afraid. When you say "double or nothing", are you proposing a 2BVC bet on the residential floor space, and no bet at all on the proportion of condos which are rented out? Or what? It makes no sense to me: "double or nothing" normally happens after A has lost a bet and B has won it. Then going double or nothing means that either B wins double the original amount, or he wins nothing. You essentially run the bet over again. Are you maybe trying to propose something whereby if I lose I lose 2BVCs, and if I win I win nothing? Posted by: Felix on December 6, 2005 07:44 AM #31 Are you trying to squirm out of it? Posted by: Sterling on December 6, 2005 06:03 PM #32 Sterling, will you propose your bet already? I've already said that I'm likely to accept. Just tell me the terms! Posted by: Felix on December 6, 2005 06:12 PM #33 I did! Posted by: Sterling on December 6, 2005 06:25 PM #34 OK, have a few moments now, I had to get someplace before 2pm and the roads are crap with snow and slush. Um, OK. My terms for the bet is those two things specified, avg. sq. footage = 600 and = 50% of condos. Either side has to get both right to collect. gotta run Posted by: Sterling on December 6, 2005 06:51 PM #35 So if one of us gets both right, he wins 1BVC or 2BVCs? And if one of the two turns out to be unverifiable, then it's a wash? Posted by: Felix on December 6, 2005 07:22 PM #36 Honestly, Felix, I doubt either number is verifiable. Like I wrote above, the city appears to track residential rental inventory by units, rather than by square footage. Also, most owners of condominium units who rent them out do so through agents - even the tenant may be only vaguely aware of the legal status of the unit. In NJ I don't think an individual condo owner even needs to report the unit as a rental property if it's in a building that's already inspected under multi-family housing regulations (or if it's a standalone unit or duplex). The rent revenue has to be reported as taxable income, naturallly, but not to any entity with housing oversight. So make it for one bottle and yes both figures have to be verifiable. That said, if either of us can show a grouping of not-completely-conclusive figures from multiple sources that seem reasonable and fall long or short of my guesses by ten percent or more, then I think we should accept them. (Of course, I have arguably already met this condition with my square footage prediction, and Geoff's calculations don't contradict it under the 10% rule I suggest.) Posted by: Sterling on December 6, 2005 10:05 PM #37 as i mentioned earlier, you can get the sf and unit count for every residential tax lot in the city from the cities web site... google 'bytes of the big apple' and look at the 'pluto' product. the license fee is $250 or you can get the info from propertyshark.com. there are 99000+ listings for manhattan. at 100 listings per page, thats a lot of cutting and pasting into excel. both of these will give you tax lot sizes (whole buildings/unit count or condo unit), which will be inclusive of common area. 10-15% is considered a fairly standard deduction for circulation. mechanical space is not included in the floor area count. happy dueling Posted by: geoff on December 6, 2005 10:29 PM Post a comment Name: Email Address: URL: Remember personal info? Yes No Anti-spam question: Share four cupcakes equally among four people. How many does each person get (in digits)? 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(7) Comments 06/12: geoff: as i mentioned earlier, you can get the sf and unit count for every residential tax lot in the ci 06/12: Sterling: Honestly, Felix, I doubt either number is verifiable. Like I wrote above, the city appears to tr 06/12: Felix: So if one of us gets both right, he wins 1BVC or 2BVCs? And if one of the two turns out to be unv 06/12: Sterling: OK, have a few moments now, I had to get someplace before 2pm and the roads are crap with snow an 06/12: Sterling: I did! 06/12: Felix: Sterling, will you propose your bet already? I've already said that I'm likely to accept. Just te 06/12: Sterling: Are you trying to squirm out of it? 06/12: Felix: You've lost me, I'm afraid. When you say "double or nothing", are you proposing a 2BVC bet on the 06/12: Sterling: I'm not sure how we could specify the terms to exclude elevators if they are included in filings. 06/12: Felix: I'm not sure about the terms of the wager: we seem to be betting on two different things at the s 06/12: Sterling: If you go double or nothing on the proposition that the amount of existing residential floor spac 06/12: Felix: Sterling, I'm afraid the factors leading to high apartment prices are much more mundane than your 06/12: Sterling: "Manhattan is the one real-estate market in the US where there are, to all intents and purposes, 05/12: Felix: Sterling, Manhattan is the one real-estate market in the US where there are, to all intents and p 05/12: sac: This thread is hilarious and sad, although a good example of how the same statistics can be appli 05/12: Sterling: Felix, just because apartments are currently going for $1.21 million a pop doesn't mean that ever 05/12: 99: There's the shark, and then there's the A train. Sterling's Manhattan clearly stops at 96th stree 05/12: Felix: Renter-occupied apartments are much smaller than owner-occupied apartments. And as the < 05/12: Sterling: Geoff - The only reason I was pompously snug is because Felix had reacted to to my estimates with 05/12: geoff: if anyone is real curious why not pony up the $250 to get a list of every tax lot in the city?<br 04/12: Sterling: The multiplier of 4 was back-of-envelope guess. The 280,000,000 number came from <a href 04/12: Felix: Where does your 280m sq ft number come from? Your first two calculations are based on it, so I'd 04/12: 99: Sterling: do your calculations include infrastructure or is the 280MM number a percentage of raw 04/12: Sterling: I've tried to find the statistic, but to no avail. It seems that while office space inventor is 04/12: Sterling: My claim is that the amount of residential-zoned floor space in Manhattan probably works out to b 04/12: Felix: Sterling jumped the shark so long ago it's probably not surprising, but for those of you keeping 04/12: Sterling: OK, 22 square miles equals about 613,324,800 square feet. That would leave each of Manhattan's 1 03/12: Felix: OK, Sterling, let's do it your way. Assume that each of the 1.5 million residents of Manhattan ha 03/12: Sterling: I don't think I'm confused. My points are: a) there is actually quite a bit more than 22 02/12: Andrew: Susan and Sterling, you are embarassingly confused. What percentage of real estate in Manhattan i Trackbacks