To make rentals a breeze and allow for the most successful conditions possible, here are our top 5 tips:
Properly screen all potential renters: Given the amount of rights that tenants have in the NYC rental market, it is imperative to properly screen incoming tenants. Allow ensure to request standard rental paperwork- past 2 years tax returns, letter of employment stating salary, recent bank statements, copy of ID and landlord reference letter. Additionally, always independently run credit (even if will also be run by condo or coop board)! A credit report is your official report card on whether or not bills are paid on-time. Even if the apartment is in a condo/coop building, it is critical that you pre-screen tenants prior to going to the board. Especially in the case of condos, boards have incredibly limited authority over the acceptance of tenants.
Allow adequate time: When leasing apartments, always ensure you are leaving enough time in between leases for apartment turn-over work. Depending on the work involved in turn-over, we typically like to allow 3-5 business days for turn-over work. However, if the work is fairly involved or for large properties, I would consider increasing this based on scope to be performed. Also, be very careful about promising tenants a quick approval on condo/coop apartments. While sometimes these buildings are quick with board approval, most condos/coops state they have 20-30 days for review of applications. If condo/coop lease is approved only after the lease start date, the lease should begin the next business day after approval is received and the 2nd month of rent should be pro-rated accordingly.
Be on same page about move in condition: Always ensure that both owner and tenant agree on what work will be performed as part of turn-over work. Be sure to include all items the owner actually anticipates performing for the tenant, so that expectations can be properly managed and there is no disappointment when the tenant arrives on moving day. The updated REBNY lease provides an exhibit for outlining what work will be done for tenant move-in! The last thing an owner wants is a dispute over the condition of an apartment and having all action items documented helps prevent this from happening.
Ensure all mechanicals properly checked: Take advantage of the down-time between tenants to ensure that all HVAC systems and household appliances are in working order and have had preventative maintenance performed. This is a good time to ensure that filters are replaced, condensate lines have been cleared, etc so that everything is functioning properly when the tenant moves in. Due to the pandemic, there is currently extended lead times on replacements and parts for HVAC units and appliances, so always best to check their functionality ahead of time.
Have a plan in place to deal with maintenance issues:Especially in the case of absentee owners, its important to have a plan to deal with maintenance and repairs issues that come up over the course of the lease. We always recommend having a property manager in place to deal with issues as they arise. A property manager is a vital component that aside from taking the stress away from the ownership process, can also help save a tremendous amount of money when issues do occur.
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378 Adelphi Street was built in 1858 by Jeptha A. Jones a compositor and hardware store owner. During the Civil War he was a Captain in the Union army. He was wounded at Bull Run, re-enlisted and fought until 1863. He was called “The Walker” because in battle he led his men with a slow, steady pace. Jones survived the war and is buried in Greenwood Cemetery.
The style of 378 is Italianate and relatively austere compared to later brownstones. The iron work is original and restored. An effort has been made to keep as much early flavor as is reasonable and compatible with modern comfort. more “Beautiful Fort Greene Townhouse with a great story.”
The majority of millennials don’t own a home — and many say their student loans are a major reason for that. According to a 2019 survey from Bankrate, 61 percent of millennials don’t yet own a home, and nearly a quarter of them say student loan debt is what’s holding them back.
Data from the Institute for College Access and Success shows that 62 percent of college graduates financed their higher education with loans, and as of 2019, the average balance was $28,950. As of the second quarter of 2021, combined student loan debt amounted to $1.57 trillion, according to the New York Federal Reserve.
This debt holds back potential homebuyers in two major ways. First, it raises a prospective homebuyer’s debt-to-income ratio, which makes it more difficult to secure a mortgage. Second, it can make it harder to save for a down payment.
Prospect Park is easily one of the most underrated New York City parks—just ask any Brooklyn resident.
Situated in the heart of Brooklyn, the 585-acre park is affectionately known as “Brooklyn’s backyard.” It draws an average of 8-10 million visitors per year from all around the world. Particularly during the summer months, locals and visitors alike can be found picnicking and barbecuing throughout its sprawling lawns.
The park invokes the picturesque and scenic ambiance of Central Park combined with the casual, neighborhood feel of a local green space. more “Discover the History and Landscape of Prospect Park, Central Park’s Little Sister”
Showing by Appt Only Thursday July 29th 4-5pm – Graceful 25′ Wide Carroll Gardens Brownstone 
New York City will become the first U.S. city to require proof of at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine for a variety of activities for workers and customers — indoor dining, gyms and performances — to put pressure on people to get vaccinated, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Tuesday morning.
The program, similar to mandates issued in France and Italy last month, will start on Aug. 16, and after a transition period, enforcement will begin on Sept. 13, when schools are expected to reopen and more workers could return to offices in Manhattan. Mr. de Blasio has been moving aggressively to get more New Yorkers vaccinated to curtail a third wave of coronavirus cases amid concern about the spread of the Delta variant. He is also requiring city workers to get vaccinated or to face weekly testing, and he has offered a $100 incentive for the public.
“If you want to participate in our society fully, you’ve got to get vaccinated,” he said at a news conference. “It’s time.”
“This is going to be a requirement,” he added. “The only way to patronize these establishments is if you are vaccinated, at least one dose. The same for folks in terms of work, they will need at least one dose,” he said, holding up a single finger.
On Monday Mr. de Blasio stopped short of reinstating an indoor mask mandate even as large urban areas, including Los Angeles County, San Francisco and Washington, and at least one state did so. He said he wanted to focus on increasing vaccination rates, and was concerned that requiring everyone to wear masks would remove an incentive for those who are considering getting vaccinated now.
Nationally, new cases have reached an average of about 86,000 a day as of Monday, a dramatic jump from about 13,000 daily cases a month ago but still far fewer than in January. Hospitalizations have risen as well, but hospitalizations and deaths remain a fraction of their devastating winter peaks.
About 66 percent of adults in the city are fully vaccinated, according to city data, although pockets of the city have lower rates. The federal government has authorized three vaccines for emergency use in the United States: The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines both take two doses while Johnson & Johnson uses a single dose. Individuals are not considered to be fully vaccinated until two weeks after their final dose.
Fully vaccinated people are protected against the worst outcomes of Covid-19 caused by the Delta variant, but there’s a sharp drop in the efficacy if an individual has only had one dose of a two-dose vaccine.
The new program, dubbed “Key to NYC Pass,” is not a particular document, but rather the strategy of requiring proof of vaccination for workers and customers at indoor dining, gyms, entertainment and performances, including Broadway, the mayor said.
Indoor movies and concerts will also require people to show proof of vaccination to enter. People will be able to continue to dine outdoors without showing proof of vaccination.
To enter indoor venues, patrons must use the city’s new app, the state’s Excelsior app or a paper card to show proof of vaccination. The mayor did not say how the city will handle vaccinations like AstraZeneca or Sinovac that may be common among international tourists.
Children younger than age 12 will not be excluded from venues because they are not eligible to be vaccinated, he said. But the details of those plans remain to be worked out. “We have to figure out how to do things in a safe manner,” the mayor said.
The city will issue a health commissioner’s order and a mayoral executive order to put the vaccine mandate in place. The six weeks before enforcement begins on Sept. 13 will be spent educating businesses and doing outreach, he said.
The mayor said the city consulted with the U.S. Department of Justice and got a “very clear message” that it was legal to move forward with these mandates, even without full F.D.A. approval.
Only people fully vaccinated in the state of New York can get an Excelsior pass, which confirms vaccination against city and state records. Everyone, however, can use the city’s new app, NYC Covid Safe, because it is simply a digital photo album that stores a picture that a person takes of their own vaccination card and does not double check it against any registry. A paper card from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must always be accepted, too.
Emma G. Fitzsimmons is the City Hall bureau chief, covering politics in New York City. She previously covered the transit beat and breaking news. @emmagf
Sharon Otterman has been a reporter at The Times since 2008, primarily covering education and religion for Metro. She won a Polk Award for Justice Reporting in 2013 for her role in exposing a pattern of wrongful convictions in Brooklyn. @sharonNYT
Joseph Goldstein covers health care in New York, following years of criminal justice and police reporting for the Metro desk. He also spent a year reporting on Afghanistan from The Times’s Kabul bureau. @JoeKGoldstein
Emma G. Fitzsimmons, Sharon Otterman and Aug. 3, 2021
By Appointment Only: Sunday, June 27, 2021, 1:00 – 2:00
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Real Estate Industry Calls Zestimate’s Accuracy Into Question, Even After Upgrades
Zillow recently announced the launch of its revised Zestimate model, alleging a more accurate assessment of home values. But who is this data for and how precise is it? Recent moves suggest the motive for the portal-turned-brokerage is simply to funnel more seller leads to Zillow Homes‘ pipeline.
“Let’s keep in mind that Zillow’s primary interest in tweaking the Zestimate is to support Zillow Offers; to increase the number of sellers who are inspired by their home’s Zestimate to request an appointment with a Zillow broker,” says Jim Smith, broker/owner, Golden Real Estate.
“It’s a great prospecting tool for them! Get your foot in the door, do a real CMA and buy the home at a price which, by design, is not full value since Zillow isn’t in the business of losing money on resales! A cynic might describe that business model as ‘bait and switch,’” adds Smith.
Zillow actually began monetizing their Zestimate in February of 2021, utilizing the home value estimate as a bargaining chip for the brokerage’s Zillow Offers program. For about 900K eligible homes across 23 real estate markets, the Zestimate transforms into an initial cash offer price for those utilizing the iBuyer option.
According to the company, the upgraded valuation model uses neural networks to leverage deeper property data history, including sales transactions, tax assessments and public records. Due to this, Zillow says it has improved the Zestimate’s national median error by a full percentage point (to 6.9%) for more than 104 million homes.
“Since we introduced the Zestimate in 2006, we have never stopped innovating in order to provide consumers with the most accurate home valuations,” said Dr. Stan Humphries, Zillow chief analytics officer and creator of the Zestimate, in a statement. “The new architecture we’re debuting today represents another significant step forward in our efforts to harness big data to create more certainty for consumers, which leads to better decisions.”
While Zillow has made some improvement to its home valuation model, however, some say the change isn’t drastic enough to be deemed “accurate.”
“Zestimates are definitely impacting the real estate business and how sellers are viewing their current market value. Zestimates are inaccurate on so many different levels,” says Jacqueline Balza, broker of record at Inspired Dream Real Estate, who argues that Zillow still does not take into account all of the property information needed to provide an educated valuation estimate.
“Zestimates do not properly take the age and current conditions of a home into consideration when giving current market value. Because it’s a computer, it doesn’t know what the current condition is. Only a real estate professional can go in and advise the owner on current market value due to the current condition,” adds Balza.
Carrie Lukins, broker/owner at Sellstate Alliance Realty & Property Management agrees—the onus for home valuations should be on real estate agents, not technology.
“Though Zillow may have updated their algorithms for Zestimates, a computer never takes the place of a local expert. A local REALTOR® who has intimate knowledge of your individual market will always be far more superior than Zillow,” says Lukins.
“Their data is culled from the entire nation, not your individual neighborhood,” adds Lukins, who is only incentivized to compete even more amid the increase in data adoption. “We can always appreciate that Zillow is trying to squeeze out the local expert; that just encourages us to educate the consumer and our local community about our value and expertise.”
Not all practitioners hold a pessimistic view. While in the minority, some believe Zillow’s continued foray into big data signals improved resources for agents, home sellers and prospective buyers.
“Zillow is already the most visited real estate website in the country, and that is due, in large part, to their Zestimates,” says Kofi Nartey, broker, Society Real Estate + Development. “With greater accuracy, Zillow will continue to find more alignment with the comps their agent partners are running. Overall, it becomes a win for consumers and agents.”
The overwhelming majority, however, say Zillow’s Zestimates only take away from the accuracy provided by real estate agents and appraisers.
“From my perspective, these computer algorithms have little to no impact as they use a limited set of data to come up with estimates,” says Vini Moolchandani, a broker with Compass Real Estate. “Machine algorithms can solve the objective puzzle to some extent based on availability of data. On the other hand, appraisers and REALTORS® use lots of additional data points that are not possible for any machine to incorporate in their estimates.”
Sebastian Hurtado, an agent working under Balza’s brokerage, says all the evidence one needs is in Zillow’s history.
“The consumer is quick to run to Zillow to get their information, not taking into account the flaws in the algorithm,” says Hurtado. “Sellers get a false idea of what their home is worth. Five years ago, Zillow’s CEO’s home sold for 40% under its Zestimate. That should be all the proof you need to know that the expertise of a professional isn’t quite ready to be replaced by a computerized system.”
As reported by RisMedia.com
Liz Dominguez is RISMedia’s senior online editor. Email her your real estate news ideas to lizd@rismedia.com.
COVID-19 has been a shot directly at the heart of what makes cities vibrant—the amenities which draw people for plays, retail, restaurants, etc. have been shut down; and at the same time offices have been largely closed while people work remotely. Under those contexts, it is maybe unsurprising that people have moved elsewhere. But are those shifts temporary or permanent? How is this impacting the real estate market—which is seeing an unprecedented boom? Is this pandemic just a temporary blip in the factors that make cities great, or are the ongoing shifts accelerants of broader social changes?
We explore these questions in a recently updated Working Paper with Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, Vrinda Mittal, and Jonas Peeters; you can see a short presentation of the project below (and another link here). Here, I want to pick up a few of the threads in the paper and think about future trends.
We do a few things to break apart whether the pandemic is transitory or permanent. First we look at rents contrasted with prices. The rental market is a spot market: the inventory clears period-by-period (subject to some vacancy) meeting demand. The housing market is more forward looking, incorporating expectations of future changes.
And rental markets have really changed. We look at the rental gradient (or bid-rent curve)—the extent to which being closer to the center of the city carries a premium. This has basically disappeared completely across a sample of 30 MSAs, while the price premium has declined somewhat but not by as much. This tells us the transitory effects of the pandemic are pretty strong, virtually eliminating the premium for urban space in the short-term market, and much higher than the permanent changes captured in prices.
You can get a clear visual sense of these trends by looking at the Bay Area and New York—two of the most affected superstar cities. Prices—but especially rents—are really going down in the urban centers which used to command a large premium; and going up in the wide swath of suburban land around cities.
By the way, this is why there is not really a “puzzle” of rents and prices moving in opposite directions. You see trajectories of urban revaluation across both rents and prices—just much weaker in prices, which reflect the permanent component of revaluation.
In the paper, we also look at survey data on whether this will be a permanent or transitory shock, and estimate the degree of urban recovery. In the context of a Campbell-Shiller decomposition, we estimate that future rents will rise to justify the current level of prices. Cities aren’t dead, but they are temporarily shocked and partially reshaped by remote work.
When we look at the cross-section—across MSAs; and within cities across ZIP codes—there is one factor which clearly predicts changes in migration and real estate patterns: the share of people who can work remotely.
In general, this could reflect two main things. Remote workers tend to be exactly the sort of highly educated urban professionals who have recently flocked to cities for amenities, and may now be reassessing urban attractions even on a permanent basis. It’s an interesting paradox, as Lukas Althoff, Fabian Eckert, Sharat Ganapati, and Conor Walsh explore, that the people who have packed themselves most densely at the centers of cities are also the same people who could, potentially, do that job remotely.
The other channel—and I personally think this is the main one—is that we have had a drastic shift in remote working norms enabling persistent changes in residential location. I draw a lot here from Adam Ozimek and Nick Bloom. Barrero, Bloom, and Davis, for example, have a survey which highlights the importance of the “hybrid” model—30% of workers here want to work remotely all the time (enabling moves outside the MSA), while 10% of people want to be in the office all the time. The remaining 60% of workers envision a future where they will show up to the office some number of days in the week, but not all.
What the hybrid model enables is a resorting of desired residential location within your MSA. If you think you have a fixed commuting budget; you might be willing to spend a little bit longer commuting each way, if you make the trip fewer times a week.
We see evidence of this in a recent NYT piece by Jed Kolko, Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui; which uses USPS change of address data to track moves. You see big relative change in migration in metros like New York, San Jose, and San Francisco—these areas have the combination of high remote work (opening up the possibility of moving) combined with NIMBYism and supply constraints (high costs, and high incentives to move out).
Within these metro area, we see large migration in the extreme exurban fringes of cities like New York—which are also the same areas where we saw high price changes. Many of these places are actually outside the technical MSA boundary, and were not even really considered commutable before—but that was on the old five-day-a-week schedule. Remote work opens up a broader radius in which you can optimize your housing choices.
This brings up questions about whether these changes in real estate choices are actually good. Cities, after all, are home to all of these great agglomeration economies. Will a more suburban America feature lower growth, if we miss out on all of the great water cooler talk and post-work drinks that fuel innovation?
I think the first-best solution here is clear—just build enough housing in dense, productive cities so people can access affordable housing stock in the cities they work in. The problem is we have made superstar cities, where attractive jobs are located, impossible to build in. Urban economists are inclined to attribute some of the resulting urban premium to people moving to cities in order to access urban amenities, and that’s surely part of the story. But many workers are simply forced to pay high Bay Area and New York City rents to access jobs, which means that rising rents have just eaten up a large chunk of economic gains. In the absence of YIMBY efforts in these cities, increased remote work is a new force which pushes against those economic constraints to open up new working possibilities elsewhere.
I’m ultimately optimistic that firms are going to be able to figure out how to internalize benefits of the agglomerations that happen within-firm. Jamie Dimon, for instance, has been a remote-work skeptic—but is still anticipating a world with 40% less office demand. JP Morgan is projecting just 10% of workers being fully remote, but being able to hot-desk workers who come in only a few days each week. It’s easy to imagine Midtown Manhattan, and other large office centers under the old commuting model, being really badly affected as a result.
The external links across firms are harder to address, because firms don’t face natural incentives to encourage employees to interact with workers from competing firms. Still, I think we need to think harder about what these cross-firm spillovers actually entail. One of my favorite papers here is by Boris Hirsch, Elke Jahn, Alan Manning, and Michael Oberfichtner, who find that a large chunk of the urban wage premium in Germany just reflects more competition in urban areas, and less market power, rather than productivity differences. It’s possible this result generalizes more broadly—in which case a key question is whether firms are going to allow fully remote hiring of workers.
Greater access to high quality jobs all around the country, rather than to just people willing to move to a handful of select metros, would drastically open up pathways for opportunity—and also rebound in the form of increased spending in local communities. My own view is that trend towards greater spatial equality is one we should welcome, even it comes at the cost of intangible agglomeration economies—in part because it would address the problem of communities which have fallen behind and fallen prey to bad information bubbles. But this is not an obvious question.
The one other X-factor I’ll throw in here is crime. In the dark days of American cities in the 1970s and 1980s—they remained cultural hubs and places where young people would gravitate towards. It’s just that many people moved out as soon as they started to have families—and the problem of urban crime was a key part of that. It’s too soon to tell how crime patterns are changing in cities, but the future trajectory there will clearly also determine how cities fare.
Reported By Arpit Gupta , April 21 Arpitrage.com