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Home Equity Loans - Agony or Ecstasy You are here: About > Money > Credit / Debt Management > Getting Money and Credit > Mortgage & Equity Loans > Home Equity Loans - Agony or Ecstasy Money Credit / Debt Essentials Credit And Credit File Fundamentals Basics Of Reducing Debt Credit and Debt Workshop Fast Financial Independence Debt Counseling Primer Articles & Resources Bankruptcy & Settlement Budgeting & Frugality Credit Law Credit Reports and Scoring Debt Counseling Debt Reduction Financial Planning Fraud and Protection Getting Money and Credit Learning About Money Smart Shopping Students and Education Tips, Essentials, Archives Buyer's Guide Before You Buy Top Picks Guide Picks - Top Books On Credit & Debt Compare Insurance Carriers Compare Utility and Loan Providers Product Reviews Forums Help FREE Newsletter Sign Up Now for the Credit / Debt Management newsletter! See Online Courses Search Credit / Debt Management Stay up to date! 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If your intent is to reduce debt so that you have breathing room to pay more on other debts, a home equity loan MAY BE on the right track. However, if your objective is to have more breathing room so that you can add more debt, you are heading for a natural disaster. Basics of a Home Equity Loan - Good and Bad What is a home equity loan? A home equity loan is a second mortgage. It uses the collateral of your home to secure a loan. Good news - Because this is a secured loan, its interest is less than on many loans such as on a credit card. This is very attractive. Equally attractive is the fact that because it is a second mortgage, interest can offer a tax deduction. That's the good news. Bad news - But if a home equity loan is used to pay off unsecured debt such as a credit card, what you have done in essence is convert an unsecured debt into a secured debt with your home as the security. This is not a very sound plan. Not only that but just as when you default on your primary mortgage you could lose your home, so too you can lose your home by defaulting on your home equity loan. More bad news- Another draw back that has developed over the last few years is that often you can borrow more than your house is worth... up to 125% of the value of your home. This is called negative equity and means that if you sell the house because of a job transfer or any other reason, you must either get enough to pay off both loans or you will be paying off the home equity loan when you are trying to buy another home. Still more bad news - There is one other negative side to a home equity loan. You will have points and closing costs to get the loan just as you had when you got your first mortgage. Home Equity Warnings! Okay, so I did not scare you off with the above and you are still determined to get a home equity loan. What are the danger signs and issues to be watchful for? FTC warns: "The lender doesn't care if you can't keep up with the monthly payments. As soon as you don't, the lender will foreclose-taking your home and stripping you of the equity you have spent years building. If you take out a loan but don't have enough income to make the monthly payments, you are being set up. You probably will lose your home." Watch out for lowered payments because there is a balloon payment at the end. Balloon payments are large lump payments due as the last payment. Don't do it! Avoid home improvement cam which begin construction before any financing is settled. See Scams To Help You Lose Your Home . Avoid pre-payment penalties. If you want to pay off your loan ahead of time, you should not pay a fee to do so. A 10% prepayment fee is not uncommon... but is a lot of money. Avoid rate increases by avoiding missed or late payments. FTC Offers These Do's And Don t's: Don't agree to a home equity loan if you don't have enough income to make the monthly payments. Don's sign any document you haven't read or any document that has blank spaces to be filled in after you sign or let anyone pressure you into signing any document. Don't agree to a loan that includes credit insurance or extra products you don't want. Don's let the promise of extra cash or lower monthly payments get in the way of your good judgment about whether the cost you will pay for the loan is really worth it. Don't deed your property to anyone. First consult an attorney, a knowledgeable family member, or someone else you trust. DO ask specifically if credit insurance is required as a condition of the loan. If it isn't, and a charge is included in your loan and you don't want the insurance, ask that the charge be removed from the loan documents. If you want the added security of credit insurance, shop around for the best rates. DO keep careful records of what you've paid, including billing statements and canceled checks. Challenge any charge you think is inaccurate. 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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)? Comments: XML Atom RSS 2.0 RSS 1.0 Sources Eurof Felix Jame Michelle Mike Sage7 Stefan Sterling &c. Disclaimer Archive 12/05 11/05 10/05 09/05 08/05 07/05 06/05 05/05 04/05 03/05 02/05 01/05 12/04 11/04 10/04 09/04 08/04 07/04 06/04 05/04 04/04 03/04 02/04 01/04 12/03 11/03 10/03 09/03 Old site Recent posts 08/12: Not man enough (1) 08/12: Fare's fair (0) 07/12: Briddishisms (5) 06/12: The Trial of Saddam (5) 05/12: Leg deficiencies (4) 01/12: New York real-estate prices explained (37) 30/11: Bad vibe (22) 30/11: Thick-headed bouncers (0) 29/11: Argentina's sinister move (2) 28/11: Bedbugs and the city (8) 27/11: I've got a fast card (1) 22/11: Pedestrianize Broadway! (5) 19/11: Century 21 the next casualty at Ground Zero? (23) 19/11: Johnny Depp - sunshine traitor (4) 18/11: Gawker F***** by Yahoo! (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
Buy Property
MONEY Magazine: Buying property with family or friends - Oct. 21, 2005 Web CNN/Money Home News Markets Technology Commentary Personal Finance Autos Real Estate Real Estate SAVE | EMAIL | PRINT | SUBSCRIBE TO MONEY | Buying property with family or friends Is it a blessing or a curse? The right due diligence makes all the difference. October 21, 2005: 4:10 PM EDT By Gerri Willis , MONEY Magazine Top things to know Are you ready? Lining up cash Picking a team The hunt Closing the deal For sellers only NEW YORK (MONEY Magazine) - John D. Rockefeller once said that "a friendship founded on business...is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship." He might have added: "Except in real estate." That's because some of the most successful real estate companies have started as alliances of friends and family. Orange County, Calif. megadeveloper the Irvine Company was created in the 19th century by James Irvine and his son. Donald Trump's dad Fred taught his Apprentice plenty about the family biz. Chicago real estate guru Sam Zell credits much of his success to his longtime partnership with his college pal, the late Robert Lurie. (Old John D.'s spawn didn't fare too badly either with a family venture in the 1930s called Rockefeller Center.) To be sure, if you're just starting a real estate project, you'll find it difficult to resist the temptation to bring in friends and family as partners and investors. After all, those are the people you know and probably trust the most. But how do you avoid the seemingly inevitable "Dallas"-style dramas? 1. Trust but verify Even if she's your sister or cousin, you should investigate a would-be partner's finances before doing business with her. Handy Web sites like Intelius.com and Public-records-now.com can help you unearth basic background info like tax liens or bankruptcy filings. Ask her to share a copy of her latest credit report. Talk to her former business associates. To avoid ill will, tell her from the get-go that you'll be prying -- and invite her to do the same with your background. If she balks, calmly explain that such precautions will only make for a stronger team, suggests Nicole McAllister of the University of Southern California's Lusk Center for Real Estate. "Remember, this is business." 2. Share a vision It's critical that you and your partners agree to common goals before you buy. Will you renovate that apartment house to a level that would make a Hyatt Regency manager blush? Or do you want to rent the property "as is"? Is the goal long-term cash flow or cashing out quickly? Many partnerships founder on these simple points. 3. Get it in writing Lawyers and their contracts can't prevent every calamity, but a written agreement -- think of it as a prenup before your partnership marriage -- can prevent headaches (and heartaches) for you and the family or friends who invest with you. At the very least, an operating agreement will force you to plan for the unexpected, including death, divorce or a change of mind. You must also spell out exactly what happens if one of your partners wants to sell. Establishing a contingency plan "gets everything on the table," says Philip Davis, a C.P.A. and principal at accounting firm Kauffman & Davis in Boston. "It's like going to a therapist." 4. Hire strangers Unbiased advice is essential for all involved. Brooklyn real estate broker Tammy Shaw knows plenty about the business, but she says she'd never have bought her brownstone with family without professionals at her side. "Build a team ahead of time -- an attorney, mortgage broker or banker, and contractor," she suggests. "They have to be people all of you feel comfortable with." 5. Be an open book Garry Klein, co-founder of real estate fund Highpoint Equities in Scarsdale, N.Y., knows both the hazards and huzzahs of working with friends and family. He started buying real estate nearly a decade ago with his buddy Jeff Gault; family members have been a big source of capital ever since. "The upside is that these people know you and know what you're about; they cut you more slack," he says. "The downside is these are people you're going to see at Thanksgiving dinner." Klein shares thorough, detailed investment results every six months. Ultimately, success depends on your own ability to find good deals and execute. Friends and family can make a newcomer feel more comfortable, but you'll need to adopt professional practices for your effort to really pay off. ____________________ Gerri Willis is host of CNN's Open House. Write her at real_assets@moneymail.com . For more articles on Real Estate, subscribe to MONEY Magazine . The Hot List Most profitable renovations How risky is your 401(k)? Big new tax credits for hybrid cars More Real Estate How to buy and build on rural land Most overvalued housing markets When booms go bust... contact us | magazine customer service | site map | glossary | RSS | press room OTHER NEWS: CNN | SI | Fortune | Business2.0 = Money subscribers = Premium content -- * - Time reflects local markets trading time. † - Intraday data is at least 15-minutes delayed. Disclaimer © 2005 Cable News Network LP, LLLP. A Time Warner Company ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Terms under which this service is provided to you. privacy policy Reprints of site stories are available. Top Stories Most overvalued housing markets Risks to the economy in 2006 Which was the worst ad of all in 2005? After the ride, a rest Hilton brands reunite after 40 years YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS Follow the news that matters to you. Create your own alert to be notified on topics you're interested in. Or, visit Popular Alerts for suggestions. Manage alerts | What is this?
Selling Home
Learn About Selling español Put My Century 21 to work for you, simply register your email address and create a password. Once you're registered, you'll be able to • save property descriptions • store your search criteria • file agent information • build a custom library Find out more or register now! Already registered? Sign in . Knowledge can be the key to a speedier home sale. Learn all you can about selling from appraisals to negotiations as well as how a CENTURY 21 professional can help you market your home for the quickest sale with the best price possible. Steps and strategies for a successful sale. Learn the Basics of Selling Details on the finer points of selling. How do you prepare a house to sell? Do sellers have to disclose the terms of other offers? How is a home's value determined? What are the two most important factors when selling a home? How can can selling a home help me save money for my child's college education? Financing Lease Options Tax Matters Foreclosures -- More... Listen and learn about selling. Selling Your First Home Selling II: Advanced Topics Quick jump to common selling terms. Adjusted Cost Basis Bridge Loan Disclosure More... ©2005 Century 21 Real Estate LLC. An Equal Opportunity Company. Equal Housing Opportunity. Each CENTURY 21 Office Is Independently Owned And Operated. All rights reserved. Information appearing on this site has been produced by or obtained primarily from Century 21 Real Estate LLC and its representatives and from CENTURY 21 franchisees. Century 21 Real Estate LLC is not responsible for the accuracy or completeness of the broker information, sales associate information, listing information or other information provided by our franchisees appearing on or through this site. Such information has been provided by independent third parties who are solely responsible for such content. Certain conditions and restrictions apply to System promotions. Terms and Conditions of Use.