Matrix Blog

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed Ski. Whether I’m on the trail, on the lift or in the lodge, I’m always taking notes with my gloves off.

Check out my 3CW column on @Curbedski:

Over the last decade, sales of high end Aspen residential properties have followed a logical flow, consistent with the overall U.S. housing market. Activity peaking in 2006; extinguished with the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008; weakness in 2011; showing elevated levels over the past year; all tell the national real estate story. And recently…

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It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

It’s been a while since I dropped in on Curbed with a Three Cents Worth post but since I’m currently huddled next to an air conditioner, I really needed to take my mind off the heat and humidity. I thought I’d reach back into history and trend the year-over-year changes in the Manhattan sales and rental markets. I presented the median rental price and median sales prices by quarter back to 1991 measuring their year over year percent change. I’m surprised I haven’t done this before since there is so much discussion about the relationship between the two markets, and whether it’s better to rent or buy…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column: Three Cents Worth: Tracking 24 Years of Manhattan Sales and Rental Prices [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, 3CW, median sales price, median rental price, housing bubble, year-over-year, dot-com

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #290 NY] Tracking 24 Years of Manhattan Sales and Rental Prices

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

This week I thought I’d dig out some of the residual stuff from last week’s rental report to explore the vacancy hyperbole. As far as I know, firms that present the vacancy rate (including mine) use a sampling of buildings from different neighborhoods/regions of Manhattan where building rental status is continually updated. The bottom line—and a reality check—is that the vacancy rate has always been low. It’s remained below 5 percent since at least World War II. (At least that’s what I’ve read; I only started writing for Curbed circa 2004.)…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column: Three Cents Worth: Proof: Summer Is the Hardest Time to Rent in New York City [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, Seasonality, 3CW, average monthly rent

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #289 NY] Proof: Summer Is the Hardest Time to Rent in New York City

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed Hamptons, at the intersection of sand dunes and real estate in the East End of Long Island, NY.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedHamptons:

Now that we’ve crossed over into June, I thought I’d illustrate the price trend relationship between the Hamptons and Manhattan. The former seeing a majority of single family sales and many second home purchases. The latter with a housing market of 98% apartments and single family family sales are a rounding error. Despite the differences in their housing stock, their behavior in terms of price trends has been similar over the past decade…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column: Three Cents Worth: Comparing Price Trends in the Hamptons and Manhattan [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed Hamptons, Wall Street Bonus, 3CW, foreign buyers, financial crisis, apartments, single family, sand

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #288 Hamptons] Comparing Price Trends in the Hamptons and Manhattan

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

Back in 2011, I embarked on a fun research project for Douglas Elliman’s 100th anniversary, in which I traced how sales prices and rents changed since the 1910s. I explain in detail how I did the research here, but I ended up with a very loose proxy to represent price per square foot for sales and average monthly rents during each decade…

Here are some other ways to view the 100 year trend based on feedback from readers.

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My latest Three Cents Worth column: Three Cents Worth: Tracking New York Rents and Asking Prices Over a Century [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, Elliman Magazine, 3CW, inflation, average price per square foot, average monthly rent

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #287 NY] Tracking New York Rents and Asking Prices Over a Century

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

The Washington Post published an article last year titled “8 in 10 Manhattan home sales are all-cash,” a statement that was (and still is) hyperbole; the actual figure was 45 percent. The data is worth revisiting, though, and I thought it might be a good time to look at the makeup of Manhattan apartment purchases in regards to cash versus financing. Obviously, there has been some confusion in the past, so I thought it would be helpful to display a year’s worth of trend data…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column: Three Cents Worth: How Many NYC Apartments Are Bought With Cold Hard Cash? [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, Cash, 3CW, Co-ops, Condos

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #286 NY] How Many NYC Apartments Are Bought With Cold Hard Cash?

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed Ski, whether I’m on the trail or in the base lodge of a ski mountain near you…or I’m in the lift line taking notes with my gloves off.

Check out my 3CW column on @Curbedski:

For my first Three Cents Worth column on Curbed Ski, I felt compelled to provide a look at one of the priciest ski towns around: Aspen, Colorado. As a real estate analyst and appraiser for nearly 30 years (and a skier, of course!) I have relied on information culled during the research for the quarterly housing market report for Douglas Elliman. In Aspen, the first quarter of 2015 reflected a thorough shift towards larger home sales resulting in large aggregate housing prices gains…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column: Three Cents Worth: Aspen Real Estate Has Had Many Peaks, But It’s Not Peaking [Curbed]

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Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #285 Ski] Aspen Real Estate Has Had Many Peaks, But It’s Not Peaking

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed Miami, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the Magic City. And I’m taking notes on the beach.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedMiami:

As we make our way through the second quarter (more than halfway!), I took a look at some trends extracted from the first quarter reports we prepare for Douglas Elliman. I went all out and created a four charter that addresses a number of issues born out of the financial crisis that still touch the current market..

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My latest Three Cents Worth column: Three Cents Worth: Miami Drill Down: Picking Up the Scraps of the Financial Crisis [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed Miami, 3CW, financial crisis

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #284 Miami] Miami Drill Down: Picking Up the Scraps of the Financial Crisis

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed LA, texting at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate, just off the freeway.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedLA:

Since Los Angeles is all about relationships and you don’t know me (yet), I thought I’d better get started on my first Three Cents Worth Column for Curbed LA. I’ve been compiling and analyzing data for Douglas Elliman’s market report series for more than 20 years and one thing I’ve learned: there is nothing better than a good chart. For this column I thought I’d explore the relationship between days on market and listing discount and how that is changing…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column: Three Cents Worth: How Much Does It End Up Costing When a House Lingers on the Market in Los Angeles? [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Listing Discount, 3CW, Curbed LA, days on market

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #283 LA] How Much Does It End Up Costing When a House Lingers on the Market in Los Angeles?

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

Since both the sale and rental markets in New York City continue to plot a parallel course—and that’s upward—I thought I’d break down both markets by the number of bedrooms and see how they compare. Turns out the mismatch is quite pronounced at the extremes of each market…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column: Three Cents Worth: Renters Love Small Apartments; Buyers Are Relegated To Them [Curbed]

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Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #282 NY] Renters Love Small Apartments; Buyers Are Relegated To Them

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

After covering more serious topics as of late, this week I thought I’d lighten things up and look at New York city’s signed contracts by day of the week. I used the roughly 2,000 contract dates I had for the closed sales in Q1 of 2015, as used in the Elliman Report for that time period, and parsed out the market by day of the week. Strategically, there is probably nothing to be learned from this exercise, but hey, it’s an angle I’ve never examined before…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Three Cents Worth: 6 Graphs That Prove New York Real Estate’s Love of Mondays [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, Contracts, 3CW, Mondays

Comments Off on [Three Cents Worth #281 NY] 6 Graphs That Prove New York Real Estate’s Love of Mondays

It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

Although I’m often a bit macro in this column, it’s Micro Week at Curbed. So I thought I would rank Manhattan neighborhoods by the average square footage of their studio apartments based on all the closed sales of 2014. The results are in: if you want a plethora of small apartments, look uptown. On both the East and West Sides above 96th Street, from Morningside Heights and the Upper East Side to Harlem and Inwood, the average studio clocks in at under 500 square feet. By contrast, downtown, in areas like Soho, Tribeca, Battery Park City, and the Financial District, studios are larger…

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My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Three Cents Worth: Which Manhattan Neighborhood Has The Smallest Studios? [Curbed]

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Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, 3CW, Micro Week, micro apartment

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