Tips, Trends and Tales from a Pro
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Real Estate
Change in our local residential real estate market, and for that matter in life, is a given and our only constant. For every up, there comes a down, and for every step forward, there’s a step or two back. Life has its turns, and real estate has its cycles.
According to nyc.gov, Bedford-Stuyvesant measures 2.782 square miles and has a population of 154,332: 64% black, 20% Hispanic, 11% white, 5% other. Occupying north central Brooklyn with Crown Heights to the north, Clinton Hill to the east, Williamsburg to the south and Bushwick to the west, Bed-Stuy is a small fraction of its parent Brooklyn borough which totals 71 square miles and 2,629,150 residents. Its housing stock, dominated by an estimated 6,000 3-4 story townhouses that date mostly from the late 19th century, is increasingly attracting more and more homebuyers who feel priced out of the other residential markets as well as U.S. and foreign investors looking for steady return and appreciation.
With the click of a mouse, homeowners today can obtain instant quotes on the value of their most significant asset: their homes. Banks, insurance companies, real estate brokerages and even media companies offer computer generated property valuations using formulaic software based on publicly available metrics such as square footage, number of rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms and recorded neighborhood sales. These computer-generated estimates, however, lack elementary inspections, critical market perspective and professional intuition, so they fall grossly short of the mark
No matter where we are in the cycle of real estate’s ups and downs, it’s appropriate to consider where we’ve been, evaluate where we are and think about where we are going. This year nearly every industry event I attended focused on the market’s upper end, a subject that has captured the most press recently. Last week’s Annual NYC Real Estate Showcase + Forum hosted by The Real Deal opened with the question “What’s Ahead For Luxury?”
