REBNY (The Real Estate Board of New York) had a luncheon on Tuesday and my company, The Corcoran Group, bought a table and kindly offered me a seat.  It was mostly New York commercial brokers who were there to hear a panel of commercial experts.

Lunch was at the Hilton and was your basic hotel luncheon:  salad, chicken and desert; but the chicken was moist, so the food was better than most.  The crowd looked like a convention of Vaudeville agents, older men with comb-overs and rumpled suits.  The speakers were expected, yet one, Richard LeFrak was mesmerizing.  Mr. LeFrak and his family are the developers of Lefrak City and Newport area of Jersey City.  He did everything wrong that a panelist should do.  He constantly looked at the floor, made faces when he was bored or in disagreement, and constantly fidgeted.  I loved him!  He was down to earth, highly opinionated, smart and straight out of central casting.  He could have easily been a character on Seinfeld.  If you ever get a chance to hear him speak, go.  You will not be disappointed.

So what did I learn?  Commercial financing is much tighter then residential; and if you have big bucks there are major deals to be made by purchasing government owned assets through the FDIC.

I have had a dream for years, actually a fantasy, that I could reduce my personal belongings down to 4 or 5 suitcases. 

August of 2008, Lehman Brothers fell, the Manhattan real estate market skidded to a stop, and I had a team of five whose incomes depended on my production.  Preparing for the worst, I thought this would be a great time to downsize, reducing my living expenses by 50%.  So I packed up my two bedroom, 2 bath loft (1200 square feet), put the majority of my belongings into my brother’s basement in Pennsylvania and moved to a 330 square foot  condo in Hell’s Kitchen.

Well, we are coming up on one year in my studio and I thought you might like to know how the fantasy is doing.

Getting rid of my stuff was the easy part.  I actually didn’t get rid of it, since I could travel to PA. and visit my belongings.  But it is amazing how little I need around me.  I donated 60% of my clothes that I never wear, gave tons of my good stuff out to family and friends for Christmas last year, increased the size of the Staten Island landfill, and kept at my brother’s what I might want to use in a future country home.

Since the space was so small, I furnished the studio with items that could do double duty:  the sofa opens into a bed; the long parsons table functions as a desk, dining table, and altar; the Georgian influenced cabinet holds an assundry of items including the TV, travel supplies, books and photos; and the the coffee table/bench serves both purposes.  I kept some of my favorite art, those pieces that would fit, and had the apartment painted in a soothing taupe/grey.  The place looks pretty good I think and feels like home.

It will be a year this December in my tiny studio and overall it has been a success.  It has been an easy process, mostly due to my house cleaner, Lela, who is a saint and comes once a week to clean, iron, and dump out kitty litter.  Jeep, my cat, never has a room to get away from me which may explain why he likes to spend so much time drinking water out of the toilet.

So where do you put the kitty litter box in such a small space when the bathroom and kitchen have no floor space to spare?  In a side table, of course.  I had two Ikea tables that are square boxes on wheels that are without fronts and backs.  I then bought a 4″ deep tray that fits the space.  To hide the offending sight, I placed an easel that a deceased client left to me with a very old photograph on cardboard of a young child in an elaborate wood frame I found at a flea market.  Jeep has plenty of room to enter and do his stuff and the back of the photograph acts as a barrier to flying kitty litter.

I thought I could be the type of person who puts his bed away in the morning and sets it up every night.  I’m not.  The only time the bed gets put up is when Lela comes on Tuesdays to clean or by some uncommon circumstance I have a guest over.  Frankly, two people in the apartment feels crowded.

So, if you like living alone, studio living is not that bad.  Next time, I’ll get an alcove so I won’t feel bad about not making my bed.

In the last two months three of my clients have been in bidding wars which is fascinating, since we are technically in a buyer’s market.

Today, one of my sellers received four offers over ask on a $1,500,000 loft in Chelsea (click on the photo to see the full listing).

Two of my buyers were also in a bidding war recently, with one winning the negotiations. 

It seems there is high demand for Manhattan properties when you get the price right.

I have a great client who is looking for a small two bedroom in Harlem for under $350,000 and wants to finance 100% of the purchase price with a VA loan.  Now I’ve done over a thousand deals in my 25 years of selling real estate in Manhattan and I’ve never done a VA loan nor have I done 100% financing.  This is all new to me.

We found a great place, negotiated a deal, and are trying to satisfy the VA requirements, which are basically FHA approved housing.  It is complicated and frankly my client knows more about this topic then the so called ‘experts’ seem to know.  We are moving along, but slowly and that is my problem.  My client takes forever to get to his point in a conversation and I go way too fast for his liking I am sure.  He’s a great guy and we seem to have fallen into an acceptable pattern where I listen longer than I normally would and he graciously allows me to cut him off before he says everything he wants.  Clearly, we go through life at different speeds. 

One option is for me to slow down to his speed, he is the client.  My sister’s ex-husband took forever to get to a point or tell his story and I tried and tried and couldn’t stop myself from interupting him and telling him the end of his story.  Ultimately we have rudeness on one hand (me) and boredom on the other (also me).  So this is all about me and not the client.  I know not interupting others is a good thing, but boy, what a challenge.  I’ll give it a go….I think.

Yesterday I was out showing $10,000,000 properties on Fifth Avenue and today I am talking VA loans.  I love my job.  I might not see the entire spectrum of humanity, but at least I encounter the range of mankind with good credit scores.

The luxury real estate market in Manhattan has been very slow since the Lehman Brothers failure in August of 2008.  Recently it has picked-up.

I had a new client in this week from Europe who runs a major banking firm and wanted to look at apartments with views on Fifth and Park Avenues.  Since the views are better on Fifth and we only had a few hours, we focused the search there.

We looked around the $10,000,000 price range and saw some amazing apartments.  I show apartments with stunning views all the time, but a high floor on Fifth Avenue is the best.  The contrast between Central Park and the rest of the city is dynamic, unlike any urban center in the world. 

We saw gorgeous apartments, tacky ones,  great layouts, and some not so great.  It is nice to know for those of us who cannot afford one of these apartments that even at $10,000,000 my buyer will have to make compromises on his purchase.  Either he will get the view with 3 bedrooms, and a terrace, but the apartment needs a renovation or he will get his desired wishes and sacrifice a bedroom.

Everything about these apartments are exclusive.  Many require 50% of the purchase price down or more.  Showings in most of the buildings are limited from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Friday.  Some have priavate dining rooms for their owners.

I wish I could take all of you in, but let’s face it, if you don’t have the dollars we are not getting past the front door.  It is fun at times, selling real estate in Manhattan.

I just saw the movie ‘Julie and Julia’.  It was great and Streep was amazing as usual.  One thing that interested me was how much fun Julie’s blog was.  It was so very personal with her daily struggles and victories.  Then it hit me, yes, my blog is very, very boring which is one reason why it takes me  forever to get a new entry posted.

So that is changing today.  From now on this blog will be about my life in New York City real estate.  If you like the factual data, sign up for my Newsletter:  http://www.patricklillygroup.com/Newsletter and click on ’subscribe to this newsletter’.

Things are going to get personal around here.

I recently spoke at the CRS (Certified Residential Specialist) Sellabration which is their yearly convention on Creating Buyer Loyalty and Urgency. It was held in one of my favorite cities, San Francisco.

A large contingency came from Spain, and as it appears, their real estate business practices are similar to ours in New York City. The editor of Immobilarios ( a spanish real estate magazine ) is Fernando Garcia and he posted the following video of me on youtube with Spanish balloons. Clearly, I need to lose weight and it is fun to watch with the spanish subtitles in balloon form.

Fidelidad sin Contrato

A new agent came into our manager’s office upset about a deal that was falling apart.  It seems the owner had given the agent the square footage figure from a recent appraisal.  The purchaser had their interior decorator/architect measure the space and it came up 150 square feet short of the number quoted by the agent.  The purchasers, naturally, wanted a price reduction.

Square footage is a funny thing in Manhattan, especially when dealing with coops.  It is my experience that two apartments each quoted as 1,000 square feet will be dramatically different in size.  Well how can that be, I mean a number is a number?  New York courts have ruled that it is perfectly acceptable for residential space to be quoted in "Gross Square Footage", a standard practice borrowed from commercial real estate in the city.   Gross Square Footage can be defined for practical purposes as the entire square footage of the relevant space including the bricks outside the walls and the space’s portion of common element on that floor.  For example, if the floor has four apartments of equal size, then 1/4th of the common hallways, 1/4th of the elevator shafts, and 1/4th of the stair wells would be included in the gross square footage figure.  Thus the loss factor (that which is outside of the apartment itself) can very from building to building.  Hence, two apartments which are quoted as the same size may actually be quite different.  Loss factors vary from 5% to 30% with the majority averaging 20%.

Many brokerage firms do not quote square footage due to potential law suits, or they try to get around the problem by saying the square footage is approximate (which by court standards is within 3%).  When push comes to shove, the square footage quoted in the offering plan is held to be sacrosanct by the courts.  So always check that figure.  It is my suggestion that you use the square footage number as a general benchmark to compare different apartments, but ultimately realize the numbers may be off.

I would like to see our industry begin to quote both Gross and Net Square Footage figures.  I would personally find that helpful and it would make it easier comparing apples to apples.

The new agent, you might wish to know saved her deal.  The owners finally found the square footage figure in the original offering plan and it was just off 19 square feet from their original quote, well within the approximate range.