Welcoming back graduates -- at least some of them Post-college renters are back in the city, but activity not as strong as some expected June 02, 2010 07:00AM By Candace Taylor In New York, springtime…... Read more >

Welcoming back graduates -- at least some of them

Post-college renters are back in the city, but activity not as strong as some expected

June 02, 2010 07:00AM By Candace Taylor

In New York, springtime usually means a flood of fresh-faced college graduates ready to start their first job and live together in their first rental apartment.

Last year, much to the dismay of many brokers, that flood was more like a trickle, thanks to the recession. Now, with the economy improving, agents and landlords are expecting the much-hyped return of renters to the market.

"In 2009, there was an eerie lack of the annual stream of recent grads moving to the city for their first job," said Jeff Schleider, founder of Manhattan-based brokerage Miron Properties. "It's reassuring to see that these grads are back."

Buoyed by good news about the real estate market and the economy, landlords and agents gleefully primed themselves for the return of these newly minted renters. Over the last several months, as The Real Deal has reported, many landlords raised their rents and scaled back concessions, such as a month's free rent. For example, Glenwood -- one of the city's major landlords -- spread the word that beginning June 1, it would no longer offer a month of free rent at any of its buildings. (The company will continue to pay brokers' fees, for the time being at least.)

Jared Wiener, the director of sales and leasing at Platinum Properties, estimated that rents are around 5 percent higher than last year at this time. "This season, the landlords are coming out with guns blazing," he said.

But they may be getting ahead of themselves. Some rental agents reported last month that despite the buzz, activity has actually been slower than expected so far this season.

"Rental transactions have been steady since April," said Takeshi "Takk" Yamaguchi, an agent at DJK Residential. "That being said, it's nowhere near as hectic as I thought it would be."

While "landlords are taking away incentives in certain neighborhoods and buildings," he said, "they should not get too carried away in areas like the Upper East Side and Midtown."

Wiener agreed. "May is slower than anticipated, which is surprising," he said. "Clearly the job market is not helping."

That, or renters are reluctant to sign on the dotted line because they're displeased with the deals they're finding. "It's tough when their friends were able to get a similar apartment six months ago for a lower price and a free month's rent," Miron's Schleider said.

Buyers are having a similar experience. Expecting to find a slow market where they'll have their pick of deeply discounted apartments, they're surprised to find intense competition instead.

"Buyers can't believe that there are multiple offers and bidding wars happening so regularly, until they experience it firsthand," said Ari LeFauve, a vice president and associate broker at the Real Estate Group New York.

The competition is being fueled by a continued shortage of well-priced inventory, brokers said, as well as a large number of bargain-hunting buyers all reentering the market at the same time.

"Buyers are coming out of the woodwork," said Ali Jafri, an agent at Prudential Douglas Elliman. "There is a release of pent-up demand."

As a result, "everyone is going after the same listings," said Rob Jackson, a salesperson at the Corcoran Group.

The competition also intensified this spring thanks to the end of the federal homebuyer tax credit program on April 30, and those buyers are now racing to make sure their deals close before the deadline of June 30.

"The government stimulus tax break definitely gave even more urgency for buyers," said Fumiyo Hayashi, a vice president at Barak Realty. "What's difficult right now is the pressure of making sure that things are moving so that the buyers can close by the end of June to capture the tax break."

In general, buyers who don't make offers quickly enough are finding that, often to their great displeasure, they are getting outbid on the properties they want -- sometimes multiple times.

Others can't find homes at all, which can be frustrating.

"In the large-apartment segment, meaning eight to 12 rooms, there is simply no inventory," said Deborah Komarow, an agent at Warburg Realty Partnership, noting that few of these large homes have come on the market recently because sellers want to avoid discounting them. "Now that the market has stabilized, the large-apartment buyer has come back into the market, and there is nothing to show them."

Some buyers simply aren't able to accept that the crisis may be over, said Judi Desiderio, the CEO of Hamptons-based Town & Country Real Estate.

"You have the half-empty/half-full mentalities," she said. "Some are playing it like Chicken Little, 'The sky is falling,' and expect a double-dip recession with housing taking another tumble. Others -- and this is the majority -- believe we have bottomed out and are ready to buy."

One lingering concern for many is the economic turmoil in Europe.

"The Euro zone crisis may still yet spill over into the global markets, which in turn will hit New York real estate values, and this is of serious concern," said Schleider.

Still, conditions are markedly improved for brokers.

As John Reinhardt, president and CEO of Fillmore Real Estate, said, "It's great to be busy again."

"If we're taking vacations, we're not staying away too long," he said. "This is the right environment for a salesperson."

< Read less

Washington Heights 70 Haven Avenue, #4B $505,000 Three-bedroom, one bathroom, renovated, pre-war co-op. French doors, kitchen w/granite counter tops. Common areas include garden patio, laundry, bike…... Read more >

Washington Heights
70 Haven Avenue, #4B
$505,000

Three-bedroom, one bathroom, renovated, pre-war co-op. French doors, kitchen w/granite counter tops. Common areas include garden patio, laundry, bike and storage rooms. Common Charges: $890. Last asking Price: $519,000 Weeks on Market:15 Agent: Deborah Komarow, Warburg Realty.< Read less

SKETCH PAD Making the Most of the View Lynn Gaffney Architect The New Hearth Lynn Gaffney’s reinvented kitchen would occupy the space where the living room once was. A three- section table would occupy…... Read more >

SKETCH PAD
Making the Most of the View

Lynn Gaffney Architect

The New Hearth Lynn Gaffney’s reinvented kitchen would occupy the space where the living room once was. A three- section table would occupy its center. Each section could be adjusted in height for working or dining.

DOCTORS in white coats hustled by, yet a peaceful aura surrounded the building at 70 Haven Avenue, right next to New York-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital in Washington Heights. Even though the cars were parked up and down the hill in this enclave near the Hudson River, there was very little traffic. A western oasis, then, with the feeling of a pedestrian mall.

Lynn Gaffney, an architect, and her team strolled up the avenue, gazing up at two limestone apartment buildings on the river side, both built in the 1920s but one with Art Deco touches and the other with Gothic. The Gothic one, No. 70, has an elegant lobby (without a doorman). Upstairs, a two-bedroom apartment with a large formal dining room is derelict, an estate sale, priced at $429,000.

Walking in the door, Ms. Gaffney seemed slightly discombobulated: the layout was like a maze. A long hallway stretched toward the living room — there is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. Once there, the room seemed small, possibly because it had no view and was cut off from the hall by a closet.
The view was blocked by a large ugly storage shed on the terrace of a neighboring building. Yet if you looked to the left of the shed, there was the Hudson River flowing in all its majesty.
“How frustrating!” Ms. Gaffney said.

In her initial tour around the place, she headed past the bathroom, which is next to the living room, and into the corner bedroom. “Ahhhh,” she said. There was the river view, unblocked. But the room was not perfect: one wall came in at an angle and the direct view was from only one window, albeit not a small one.

Then she headed back through high French doors — the ceiling was more than nine feet tall and the doors must have been eight — and into the large formal dining room. Then out more French doors and back into a small kitchen nestled against the back wall.

This apartment, which had been on the market for only three weeks, clearly needed a makeover: it was big, about 1,200 square feet, but it felt small and blocked up, not only because of the truncated view from the living room but also because of misplaced closets and partition walls. This could clearly prove to be a case study for a rambling prewar fixer-upper.

Ms. Gaffney, a Manhattan modernist with many renovations under her belt, seemed excited by the possibilities.

“The living room is small, but it doesn’t have to stay that way,” she began. “You can get rid of some of these closets. Even if the French doors don’t stay there, you’d want to reuse them.”

A colleague, Younglan Tsai, was asked whether she thought the eventual redesign would include a dining room. “We’ll probably open up as much as possible,” she said. “Several years ago, we did a postwar building, where the clients wanted a loft but they wanted to live on the Upper East Side. We ended up creating a lot of space.”

A week later, the architects clearly had done what they set out to do: create space. But they had done more. Through some architectural legerdemain, they had turned the living room into — no, not a bedroom — a kitchen. The new living room is now in what had been the corner bedroom, the one with the great river view, drawn larger and longer, with a retractable glass wall that allows the rear of the room to double as a guest room or study.

The dining room and old kitchen in the back of the apartment have become bedrooms — bedrooms, one might add, with a bit of a trek to the bathroom.

“With these old apartments, you can only do so much,” said Ms. Gaffney in a matter-of-fact tone. “We would have loved to move the bathroom back closer to the bedrooms, but we couldn’t move the plumbing. That was a given.”

Another possibility explored and rejected — at least in this reasonably priced iteration — was replacing the one river-view window with a wider one at the back of the building. That would require approval from the co-op board and considerable expense — Ms. Gaffney estimated about $15,000.

In their remodeling, the architects took full advantage of the good bones, which, besides the high ceilings and doors, included basket-weave hardwood floors, and, of course, the view.

Although there were trade-offs, like smaller bedrooms, they gained something they considered more significant: a graceful flow to the “entertaining zone” — the public spaces — and a more spectacular living room.

“I started by saying, ‘What’s the least I can do?’ ” Ms. Gaffney said. “There wasn’t a heck of a lot I could do to improve it if you kept a lot of partitions. We kept the things that couldn’t be moved, and we scrapped everything else. The idea was to bring the gathering spaces up toward the front and move the private spaces back to the courtyard.”

By placing the kitchen on the river side — as well as creating a separate interior space for serious chefs — she has allowed guests to mingle in the living room and then participate in preparing dinner if they want to.

This fits in with her imaginary clients: a doctor connected with New York-Presbyterian and her husband, a young banker with a passion for cooking. “They’re real foodies,” she said.

“He said, ‘O.K., I have to go up to Washington Heights because of your job — and the good price, only $350 a square foot — but I want to create a great kitchen.’ ”

The kitchen in this imagined renovation has enormous flexibility. A long table is divided into three sections that can move up and down, from 36 inches for working to 30 inches for dining. It could easily seat 12, or it could be used for cooking classes, “with everybody chopping vegetables,” Ms. Gaffney said.

In the living room — and in the bedrooms if the clients wanted it — the walls have been upholstered with neutral fabric, to give the surfaces both warmth and texture.

Although there is no longer a dining room, Ms. Gaffney did what she predicted when she first saw the apartment: she reused the French doors, filling them with translucent glass as a mask, giving privacy to the bedrooms.

“While the bedrooms are not large — the bigger one is 12 by 12 — they both have large closets,” Ms. Gaffney said.

What the bedrooms lack, as she had noted, is a convenient bathroom. Ms. Gaffney called the broker to see if there was plumbing in the adjacent apartment that would allow at least a powder room on the back wall, where the kitchen used to be.

An enterprising idea.

“Sadly, that was not the case,” she said.

THE SPECS
Sketch Pad focuses on an apartment, house, 
loft or shack now for sale that has unrealized 
potential. Each month, a different architect or 
designer is asked to create a vision of what the 
place might look like. There are no guarantees
that the plans would be approved by co-op
boards, municipal building departments or
planning boards. But they can help real estate
shoppers learn to see past ugly paint, too-small
kitchens and a warren of rooms.

ARCHITECTS
Lynn Gaffney, Matthew Radune and Younglan
Tsai at Lynn Gaffney Architect (212) 239-1490

PROPERTY
A two-bedroom prewar apartment with a
dining room at 70 Haven Avenue in 
Washington Heights Price:$429,000

RENOVATION COSTS
About $250,000 for a complete remodelling
including switching the location of the living
room to maximize the view amd crating a large
kitchen facing the Hudson River.

REAL ESTATE AGENT
Deborah Komarow Warburg Realty
Partnership (212) 327-9629

< Read less