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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
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MSN Money - 6 reasons your home isn't selling MSN Home Hotmail My MSN Sign In Money S earch MSN Money: Help Home News Banking Investing Planning Taxes My Money Portfolio Loans Insurance Banking Home My Accounts Bill Pay Mortgages/Loans Services Credit Reports Financial Tools Track your bills Resources Decision Centers Home Buying Guide Home Financing Your Credit Rating Financial Privacy Better Banking Credit Card Smarts Bankruptcy Guide Commentary Index Related Links Manage Debt More on Budgeting Print-friendly version Send this to a friend Tap your home for extra cash Mortgage rates in your area Your credit score in seconds Home mortgage FAQs Find It! Article Index Finance Q&A Tools Index Site Map Recent articles by Bankrate.com: • Will I lose my frequent-flier miles? , 10/6/2005 • Should you insure your airline tickets? , 9/26/2005 • 10 after-the-disaster do's and don'ts , 9/21/2005 More... Related Articles Speed your home sale with these fast fix-ups The hidden financial truth about remodeling Smart -- and stupid -- ways to pay for your remodel The Basics 6 reasons your home isn't selling advertisement So, you're in agony because your home has languished on the market week after week. Here are some culprits that may be keeping buyers away in droves. By Bankrate.com Has your lawn grown up around that "For Sale" sign? Have the wasps moved into the lock box on your front door? Did you just receive an invitation to your real estate agent's retirement party? If so, chances are your home sale fizzled. Here are the six most-common reasons why homes don't sell and what you can do about it. Your home is overpriced Optimistic home sellers love to parrot the old adage, "There's a buyer for every home." But they often leave off the qualifier: "at the buyer's price." Find a loan that's right for you at the Loan Center The fact is that buyers, not sellers, ultimately determine the market value of a home. You can ask for the moon and set your listing price well above comparable properties in your neighborhood, but at some point it will be up to you, the seller, to accept what the buyer thinks your home is worth. Overpricing is the most common reason homes don't sell. When you ask an unrealistic price, it sets in motion a process that often works against you. Here's why: Most real estate agents, and hence most qualified buyers, will see your new listing within 30 days. If it is overpriced by as little as 5%, it will be duly noted and interest in your property will wane, especially if you show no intention of coming off your asking price. You likely already priced out buyers who might have qualified for financing at a more reasonable price. Even if you manage to find a buyer at your inflated asking price, the property may not appraise at that figure and the financing will fall apart. Your real estate agent may have approved or even suggested the inflated asking price to secure your listing. Conversely, other agents often use overpriced properties like yours to help sell their own listings. ("Here's what they are asking. Now would you like to take a second look at that first house I showed you?") "If you have a house that really should be priced at $200,000 and you've got it listed at $260,000, you are trying to compete against homes that really are worth close to $300,000 and all of a sudden your home really is not competing well," says Jeri Fisher of Jeri Fisher Real Estate in Missoula, Mont. "You want to compete with what is available out there among homes similar to yours." If your home remains on the market for too long, agents and buyers may begin to wonder if there are other, perhaps more serious reasons why it isn't selling. "It becomes shopworn, the same as a jacket hanging in the store week after week," says Fisher. "People are aware that it has been on the market a long time and agents stop showing it." Your home doesn't 'show' well Your home is competing against shiny new houses in those pristine subdivisions out in the suburbs with their attractive prices, incentives and community amenities. Face it: Even the best old house needs a little makeover if it hopes to attract a qualified buyer. The good news is most of the work will be cosmetic and relatively inexpensive: a new coat of paint, a few attractive window boxes, a thorough cleaning of floors and carpets. Voila! The place may look good enough to reconsider. A good real estate agent can advise you on where your time and money are best spent. "Price and condition are two things that the seller can do something about," says Fisher. "I always give people my 'honey-do' list. I think paint is probably a seller's best friend because it makes things smell fresh and look fresh. If it's time to paint, it's time to paint. It's the best return on investment." You're in a bad location Nothing has a greater effect on your home's value than its location. Your humble abode might be worth a king's ransom were it located in Palm Beach, Aspen or San Francisco. It might even jump thousands in value just two streets over in the next (and far superior) school district. "If you're in one of the higher-ranked schools around here, you're going to add $50,000 to $100,000 to the price of the same house," says Lenn Harley, a broker with Homefinders.com Inc. in Maryland and Virginia. The point is, location rules in real estate. If your home's location is less than desirable, your options are somewhat limited. A good real estate agent will do his best to help you accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative of your circumstances, say by using foliage to screen off offensive adjoining properties or dampen traffic noise. The best way to compensate for a poor location is to reduce your asking price or offer attractive incentives such as seller financing or a lease option with rent credit. You have a lousy listing agent Yep, they exist: Real estate agents who mislead, misfire and misbehave. Their bad advice can cost you plenty in time, money and the sheer hassle of keeping the place show-ready 24/7. The agent from hell will allow you to overprice your home ("Here's what I can get for you if you list with me!"), not market it properly, fail to screen for qualified buyers, be unresponsive to interest from other agents (if they sell their own listing, they don't have to split the commission) and keep you totally in the dark throughout the process. What's more, if your agent is abrasive, arrogant or otherwise difficult to work with, other agents may not want the hassle of showing any of their listings to prospective buyers. You are battling competition or market conditions We've all heard the terms "buyer's market" and "seller's market." In real estate, market conditions are affected by any number of external forces, some of them predictable (the weather, sort of), some of them unpredictable (the local economy, interest rates, public optimism or pessimism). In a "hot" or seller's market, homes go fast. Inventory (homes on the market) may be low, meaning less competition for you. Chances are better that you will get your asking price in a hot market; in fact, it is not uncommon to even be offered more than your listing price. But in a "flat," "cold" or buyer's market, sales slow to a trickle, inventories grow and buyers can find bargains, especially when they know the seller is motivated (i.e., paying on two mortgages). If you're trying to sell in a flat market, you're not only competing against all that vacant new construction, but against rentals as well. In this case, be prepared to settle for less than top dollar, or wait to sell until the pendulum swings once again in your favor. You have ineffective marketing Gone are the days when an agent could simply place your listing with the local multiple listing service, hold a halfhearted open house and wait for another agent to bring forth a buyer. Today's top performers launch a multilevel marketing plan that includes listing tours for area agents, newspaper and even TV ads, weekend open houses, listing fliers and placements in local real estate publications. Computers and the Internet also have changed the face of real estate. According to the National Association of Realtors, today more than one-third of all home buyers use the Internet for house hunting. The best real estate agents are computer-savvy. They have your listing in color on their laptops to show clients and communicate frequently via e-mail, a particular boon when working with out-of-town buyers. Suffice it to say that if your real estate agent isn't listing your home online through the company Web site as well as with the local MLS, you may not be getting the exposure necessary to find a buyer. "There are those who just put the listing in the multiple and pray it will sell and those that put a lot of effort into marketing their listings," says Fisher. "Unfortunately, with this weird system of compensation we have, they all get paid the same, whether they know nothing or have many years of experience." 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Real Estate Investing Subscribe Book of Lists Sales Power Marketplace bizwomen Money Franchise Center HR Help Email Alerts Jobs Entrepreneur Classifieds Sales Leads Latest News Print Editions Contact Paid Advertisement Article Paid Advertisement Real Estate Investing Dolf de Roos is on a mission to show you how you can make ten timesmore money with real estate investing for yourself than creating wealthfor someone else. Dolf says that when it comes to being rich or poor,there are only two types of people: those who have wealth creationsystems, and those who work for those who have them. As Dolf has traveled the world, he"s shocked a lot of people when theydiscover that he studied 8 years to earn his Ph.D. and then turned downa job offer for $32,000. A week earlier, Dolf had closed on a realestate investing deal that put $35,000 in his bank account in one lumpsum. With the proper real estate marketing techniques, this couldhappen to you too. Dolf de Roos still continues to take regular people and he shows themexactly what to do to unleash their hidden wealth earning potentialwith real estate investing. He says that people need to quit givingaway their money to someone else in a regular 9-5 job. Learningeffective real estate marketing can really do wonders to someone"sincome. After Dolf"s first experience with real estate investing, he decided tothrow himself into real estate investing full-time. Things were notalways easy for him, but he had one challenge that was unique to him.When Dolf was seventeen, he looked about twelve. The first bank managerhe visited to seek a mortgage thought it was a joke, but he persevered.He wouldn"t give up when he knew that he could make a fortune in realestate investing. Having uncovered the common success factor of the wealthy along withhis first experience of making as much in a week with real estateinvesting as he could in one year working a 9 to 5 job with a boss,Dolf never turned back, and the rest is history. Since then, many manypeople have sought out Dolf"s help in their own real estate marketingventures and have found success. Find out what Dolf de Roos is allabout! Paid Advertisement Article Home | Subscribe | Book of Lists | Reprints | Email Alerts | Classifieds | Latest News | Print Editions | Services Sales Power | Money Center | Entrepreneur | HR Help Center Community | Search | RSS Feeds bizjournals | Contact Us | Site FAQ Our brands: Search Engine Optimization by Use of, or registration on, this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement Please read our Privacy Policy ©2004 American City Business Journals, Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Contact us here . The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of bizjournals.