I am a born and raised New Yorker (as were my mother, my grandmother and grandfather, and my great grandmother, who was one of the first Jewish girls at The Brearley School in the 1880s). As such I have always been fascinated by the notion many people seem to have that they need to leave the city to raise their kids and to have a “normal” life. Like every real estate broker working here, I consider myself to be a de facto member of the local Chamber of Commerce, boosting the city at every opportunity.

So here are my Top Ten Reasons to live and raise kids in New York:

10. ECOLOGY – Since New Yorkers live vertically, we use much less fossil fuel per capita for heating. And you don’t get in your car every time you need something, thus further reducing your carbon footprint. You can take the subway, or a bus, or a cab, or …

9. MOBILITY – you can WALK! One of the best things about New York is that you can walk everywhere. It clears your head, it is beautiful, and you get aerobic exercise.

8. SAFETY – Yup, New York City is on the FBI’s list of top ten safest cities in America with populations of over 500,000 (and seriously, does something much smaller even QUALIFY as a city??)

7. PARENTAL ANXIETY – Car crashes are the leading cause of death for teenagers in the United States. How great it was for me and my wife to know that our kids were NEVER in a car piloted by a friend who may have been drinking! From doormen to neighbors, there was also safety in having an extra set of eyes on things at all times.

6. BEAUTY – with its extensive network of parks, including the jewels of Central Park, Prospect Park, and Van Cortlandt Park; its zoos and botanical gardens; its amazing neighborhoods of Victorian brownstones and 1920s apartment buildings; its iconic skyscrapers; and its reclaimed waterfronts, New York is a fascinating and richly varied treat for the eye. And if you have kids there are lots of places for them to play and hang out, many within walking distance (see MOBILITY.)

5. PHILANTHROPY – New Yorkers are committed to the not-for-profit organizations which keep their city vital. In social justice, in the arts, in education, foundations and not-for-profits are working every day to make New York and the world safer, more humane, more open, and more engaged. You can give your money, your time, or both, but giving back is a big part of living here and there are opportunities for every budget and area of interest.

4. CREATIVITY – from all over the country and all over the world, artists and creators flock to New York. Painting, writing, composing, dancing, programming, inventing – everything new under the sun is taking place here. It is inspiring just to be close to it, and opportunities to be part of it abound.

3.  ACTIVITY – whatever you love, it is readily available. Sports, museums, every kind of music, theater, nightlife, bookstores – as a kid, or a teenager, or an adult, there is never any reason to be bored in New York.

2. DIVERSITY – New York is a microcosm of the world. Ethnic and lifestyle diversity give the city its unique flavor culturally, aesthetically, linguistically, and gastronomically. New Yorkers come into contact every day with others from different backgrounds and who have made different choices. We have a clear sense of what unites us rather than what divides us.

1. OPPORTUNITY – New York offers an extraordinary number of job and educational opportunities. Every day of the year New York is filled with tourists, students, families, ambitious young professionals, and business leaders who know this is where they have to be. Here you can find or create the right school, the right niche, or the right company.

Convinced? Call me or your favorite real estate agent and we will make it happen for you or your business.  

Over many years I have observed and participated in hundreds of negotiations, many of them badly handled. Negotiation is substantially the same whether you are buying cars, jewelry, or real estate, although it is profoundly different from country to country. In Africa, in the Middle East, in Asia, many of the cultures are bargaining cultures and more aggressive bargaining is expected and respected. The same level of aggressiveness in an American negotiation could get you a punch in the nose, or at least create a hostile environment which is difficult to overcome. That said, everyone expects real estate deals to be negotiated, so here are a few do’s and don’ts to make you as effective as possible:

* DO your homework. Make sure you know the comparable sales and the pace of the market.

* DO have a strategy. Don’t make a first bid, or counter one, until you know where you want to go and how you plan to get there. Plan for at least a few back and forth interactions, preferably involving increases or decreases of diminishing size.

* DON’T be a “one offer wonder.” The LEAST successful negotiations are the ones which begin with a buyer who claims to be making one offer, take it or leave it. This is NOT an effective technique.

* DO be reasonable in your original offer or counter. If the market is strong, don’t offer 25% below the asking price.  And if you receive a reasonable offer for your property, always counter and counter aggressively. You can make much smaller counters the second or third time around. A big initial counter sinks the hook.

* DON’T get stuck on details when you are close to a deal. I have seen multi-million dollar transactions founder because neither side would give an inch on the last $10,000. This isn’t good negotiating; it’s just ego.

* DON’T personalize! A low offer isn’t insulting you personally if you are the seller and likewise a small counter if you are the buyer. This is a business transaction even though it involves that most personal of possessions, your home. And if your broker is having a big emotional reaction rather than trying to keep YOU calm and focused, fire him. He isn’t doing his job.

* DO remember that there are other important issues than money. Closing date, inclusions, contingencies or lack thereof - they can all be extremely significant influencers in a negotiation.

* DO have fun. Negotiating is a game, albeit a high stakes one. Enjoy it!

Every week my Sales Directors and I look at numerous Board packages, those daunting sheaves of documents required by co-op and condo Boards as they deliberate the appropriateness of an applicant to their buildings. In some ways the process is highly anachronistic. It resembles applying to a private club whose directors are free to accept or reject any applicant without having their motives or the legality of their decision scrutinized (although in theory co-op Boards are as subject to anti-discrimination laws as any other landlord). But in some ways the process has been vital to the enduring financial health of real estate in New York during the recent meltdown. Strict co-op Board guidelines regarding both the amount of permitted borrowing and the financial circumstances of applicants have meant more qualified buyers and more equity in our marketplace, leading to fewer defaults and distress sales. So the system is not all bad.  However, the Board application process tends to intimidate most buyers and many agents, but it is not really so complicated. Here are a few pointers:

* As a buyer, always start thinking in advance of purchase about the elements of your package. Understand that full financial disclosure will be required.

* Plan your letters to cover all the points of your personal and professional resume: family, children, leisure, philanthropies, and moral character as well as job responsibilities and accomplishments. The letters should create a full, well rounded picture of who you are.

* When preparing the financial information, remember that everything has to tie together. The numbers on the statements have to match exactly the numbers on the bank statements and other back up documents, and there must be back up documents for every number on the statements. Do you have a summer house? You need an appraisal or broker letter to verify the value. And we will need insurance estimates for your grandmother’s diamond necklace (if you are lucky enough to have it) and the Renoir as well.

* Do you own your own business or other assets which are difficult to quantify? The Board will need a letter from your accountant explaining the valuation methodology he is using and whether it is standard for the industry.

Every buyer is well served by creating a perfect Board package. And the more perfect the package is, the better the chances that the Board approval process will be smooth and relatively painless. The one indispensable ally a buyer needs-a savvy broker who understands the intricacies of assembling the package. Having a knowledgeable broker, and listening to what she says, can mean the difference between success and failure in running this most New York of all gauntlets!

When I began working as a real estate agent in 1980 there were no exclusive listings and there was no co-broking. Listings were open to everyone, and we all scurried around trying to get them: canvassing, talking to doormen, cold calling. At my first job we divided the city (it was a much smaller city then in terms of property for sale!) into territories and my friend and colleague Kay Brover and I walked West End and Riverside once a week learning what we could – who was moving, who was getting divorced, who had died. It was hard for us, but worse for our customers. They had no way of knowing if we had every listing, or what else might be out there. They had to call many different brokerages to make sure they were covering the market.

Gradually that all changed as our market evolved to look more like what was taking place in the rest of the country: sellers began in the early 90s to give exclusives, and we began to co-broke with our competitors, about whom we knew little and with whom we interacted infrequently. The game changed. The Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) created a Residential Division and we began to get to know our competitors. We agreed that we would fax each other our listings. And by the late ‘90s we were searching for a way to do that electronically. Admittedly, by that point the rest of the country was using an MLS and their co-brokerage process was far more sophisticated. But we were New York! We were unique! We did it our way!

Our way evolved from faxing to e-mailing to the REBNY Listing System, or RLS. Although the press still delights in writing about how we don’t have a multiple listing system because greedy New York agents want to keep the whole commission for themselves, in fact we have had a de facto MLS for years. But because our community cannot agree to actually establish an MLS, we all still spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on separate listing systems. Why?

As I have written in this blog before, information is no longer our currency. It’s a commodity available to everyone through the Internet.  The broker today is an advisor and  provider of expertise, not a gateway to listing data. So we should transmit data between ourselves and to consumers as seamlessly and easily as possible, ideally with a public website attached which would give unfettered access to fully updated, agent provided data on every listing. REBNY has tried to create such a public site with www.residentialNYC.com but it never has enjoyed 100% participation. The new VOW websites require complete consumer registration. Everywhere else in the country brokerages control their own data and enhance the consumer experience by marketing their properties through MLS public sites. We are probably the most elite market in the country, with an extraordinarily skilled and diverse broker population. What are we waiting for?

In my twenties I composed music and fully expected to have a career in the creative arts. Then I was waylaid by a fascination for real estate and it ate my life. Now, thirty years after I began, I am struck by the many ways in which music and real estate are similar. The successful broker is both enterprising and out-of-the-box, the way the successful artist has to be. Both work in highly competitive fields against formidable odds. Both are more likely to be successful if they develop a signature style. Here are a few examples of real estate creativity which have impressed me over the years:

• A great agent makes listening a creative skill.  Frankly, in today’s world, listening at all seems like a big skill. But the top agent has to go further - she has to hear the nuance in what she has been told which leads her to conclude what the buyer’s REAL agenda is. Sometimes the buyer doesn’t yet know what he wants, and sometimes he is too embarrassed to admit what is really driving him. Is it a prestige purchase? Is it a competitive purchase? No one feels comfortable admitting these things, but if the agent is a creative enough listener she will hear the subtext interwoven into the conversation which will give her the clues she needs.

• Neighborhood placement offers a world of creative opportunity. Often buyers are shopping in the wrong part of town, or for the wrong sort of property. The creative challenge is figuring out what really WOULD work for them and bringing them around to a different point of view. In my years as an active agent I liked to “kidnap” my buyers in these situations.  I would say “Humor me. I want to put you into a cab and take you to a neighborhood you never considered, or a property type you never considered. It’ll only take a half hour.” And off we would go. It is remarkable how often that property became the one they bought. Often THEY didn’t know that was what they wanted, or even that such a thing existed, so it was up to me to figure it out and get them there.

•  I have written a lot in recent months about marketing. In the Web 2.0 world the creative agent is ALWAYS thinking about how to extend his personal brand. Has he amassed a large group of Twitter followers? Is she a blogger? Is he leveraging school and family networks? Does he arrive at a dinner party with a list of recent sales in the building, since recent sales are EVERY New Yorker’s favorite dinner party topic?

• Finally there is the question of interpersonal psychology, something I NEVER had to deal with when writing music. What’s the dynamic between the couple? Is one of them actually the decision maker? How does the agent play it if one member of the couple is doing the looking but their agendas are different and the agent senses that the other one is actually going to drive the decision? What about the parent purchasing for a child who hates everything the parent likes, and vice versa? There is probably no area of the brokerage business in which creativity plays such an important part as relationship management. And every situation is different.

My years in real estate, like my years in music, have all been about problem solving. The burst of inspiration, which can come in either career, is exciting but not determinative. In both, it is not your great idea but what you DO with it that counts. 

Earlier this week, I was invited to a client meeting with the smart and sophisticated director of a major not-for-profit organization. The organization owns a large midtown building in Manhattan which they have had on the market for several years at a price slightly above the market. He invited me to pitch for the business, which I declined to do because in the end I felt that the price, not the agent, was the problem. But the agent’s website is minimal and not user friendly, and neither the director nor his Board had thought to look at it before retaining her. So it got me thinking about what owners of real estate need to ask about marketing when they are looking to hire an exclusive agent:

1) Go immediately to the company’s website. This is everyone’s primary marketing vehicle in the Internet age, and according to the National Association of Realtors, well over 80% of buyers begin their real estate searches on-line. The number reaches nearly 95% for international buyers. You should play around on the site a little: is it easy to navigate? Does each exclusive have a unique property page with multiple photos, floor plan, and complete description?

2) You should ask how many unique visits they have per month and what they do to drive traffic to their site. What tools are available that will give you easy access to information about your property, such as numbers of hits, number of e-mails generated, appearances in other media, etc?

3) Is the agent active on Facebook, or in the blogosphere, or on Twitter or another Web 2.0 medium? Social media increasingly offers opportunities to put your property in front of an exponentially expanding audience.

4) Does the agent or the firm have a public relations presence which ideally could get both them and your property covered? If the agency you hire appears often in the media demonstrating expertise (in other words, the kind of coverage you can’t buy) that will drive more traffic to their website and, ultimately, to your listing. And your agent’s good relationships with the major media also increase the likelihood that your property might appear in a news feature like “On The Market” in the Sunday New York Times.

5) Classified advertising in print is irrelevant today. In general print is valuable for branding more than selling purposes, but both branding and selling require a big presence to stand out in the tidal wave of advertising which surrounds us. Make sure that whatever print your agent’s firm does, it is big enough to be noticed and appears in publications which have the right reader demographic for your property.

Unless your agent can offer you a strong marketing program, your property is at a disadvantage. And in today’s ultra competitive market you want every advantage you can get!

Here’s the update from me and my agents:

* Mint condition is hot. “Needs everything” is not, unless the price REALLY reflects that reality.

* 1 and 2 Bedroom new condos are hot if they are priced at around $1000 per foot or less.  if they are much higher, and not at 15 CPW, they are not.

* Prewar apartments and lofts are hot. There are just not very many on the market, and they are still the gold standard for many people. On the Upper East and West Sides, and in Soho and Tribeca, buyers are waiting for them.

* Second Avenue is not. That subway will be great some day, but it is making a big mess!

* Classic 6’s for under $2 million are hot. Anything for $25 million is not.

* Priced right is hot. Overpriced is not.

* Rentals are hot (much hotter than they were a year ago.)  So no fee apartments are not (they’re gone!)

* New York is literally and figuratively hot. The suburbs are not.

* Smart, educated, analytical brokers are hot. Brokers who don’t really know the maintenance or the Board requirements or the pet policy or how to read the financial statement are NOT.

Here’s our advice: try to stay cool. And use this list to pursue what’s hot!

The second quarter of 2010 behaved like March in the old adage: it came in like a lion and went out like a lamb. April was the acme of a sales avalanche which began gaining force in the fall of 2009. Throughout Manhattan and western Brooklyn residential properties of every category were snapped up, often with competitive bidding, at prices averaging only 10-15% below the 2006/2007 peak. Numerous all time price records were set, especially in mid-sized and larger apartments, during March and April. Confidence and the stock market surged higher.     

Buyers began emerging and becoming active during the fall of 2009, as gradually rising prices made them apprehensive lest they miss the opportunity to purchase while the market was still depressed. The wave of purchasing gained traction during the winter, and by March inventory had dropped from a 19 month supply to an 11 month supply, essentially normalizing the marketplace. Larger properties saw particularly robust gains during this period. While the absolute top of the market (properties asking $20 million and above) remained sluggish, demand for properties of six to twelve rooms was intense.  It was precisely these properties for which demand had declined so precipitously during the period between September of 2008 and September of 2009. There was little available in this category, especially on the Upper East and Upper West sides, and only those buyers who acted quickly and aggressively succeeded in making a purchase. The early months of 2010 were replete with cognitive dissonance: buyers simply could not believe that they had missed “the bottom” and that failure to act decisively once again left them empty handed just as it had three years earlier!

The smaller apartment market, which had suffered less during the recession, rebounded less dramatically. The one- and two-bedroom markets did see significant absorption, but with lesser price increases and little competitive bidding, as supply for the most part continued to outweigh demand. The inconvenience surrounding construction of the Second Avenue subway depressed prices along that corridor and helped moderate demand for the postwar inventory which makes up the bulk of the housing stock north of 59th Street and east of Third Avenue. In the Village, in which the housing stock remains primarily rental, scarcity drove the market as it had before the recession, with many buyers competing for the few available offerings, especially in the larger two- and three-bedroom categories. In both Tribeca and the Financial District an overhang of unsold inventory from the condo construction boom helped keep prices moderate, while at the same time demand remained strong for the “old” Tribeca lofts, with their high ceilings and enormous windows, in the prewar industrial buildings for which the neighborhood was originally known. In Williamsburg, developers responded early and dramatically to the recession, slashing prices at their buildings and guaranteeing a level of activity which was the envy of most other emerging and more recently gentrified neighborhoods.

As April moved into May and May into June, first economic and then seasonal factors came to bear on the marketplace. Debt crises in Greece and Spain and a falling euro sidelined many Eurozone investors whose interest in New York real estate had buoyed the condo market for years. In our new global economy those European debt concerns began to weigh heavily on OUR equity markets as well. Consumer confidence here at home was further shaken by the program trading driven rout in stocks on Thursday May 6, which temporarily reduced many issues to near zero values. Although the market rebounded, the confidence did not. The jobless nature of our recovery, our mounting national debt burden, and government gridlock, both in Washington and Albany, further depressed the Dow, which lost value during much of June. And then, of course, summer arrived.

Real estate purchasers react in different ways to times like these. While recent developments have certainly taken the sizzle out of our market, deal flow remains healthy as buyers see a home purchase as an alternative to stocks and bonds, with significant collateral benefits. The latter half of June, July, and August are always slower in the residential sales, as both buyers and sellers spend more time out of the city. But with the market a little slower, real opportunities exist for buyers. Some sellers will still be holding out for pie in the sky, but for now that mad moment seems to be over. We predict a market driven through the summer and fall by value, as real sellers make realistic deals with serious buyers. We don’t see an upcoming loss in value, but the froth will be gone. Buyers, if you think this is a moment to flee to the sidelines, reconsider! This is 2010’s moment of opportunity.

Last week the Wall Street Journal published two articles, one Tuesday and one Friday, about high priced Manhattan sales. In the first, the reporter noted the enormous price difference between sales at 2 East 67th Street, the first a few years ago and the second a few months ago. He used these two sales to draw conclusions about the change in the market between then and now, since the recent sale closed at a price slightly less than 40% of the price in 2008.  And on Friday there was an article about a recent contract signed at 15 Central Park West (allegedly for slightly under $7000 per foot) in which the author observes that the upper end condo market shows more strength than the upper end co-op market and quotes expert opinion that 15 Central Park West is “operating somewhat independent of the luxury market”. He also quoted me giving, in abbreviated form, the opinion I reiterate below-

Here’s that opinion: one or two sales do not make (or break) a market.  In every environment there are outlier sales (sales which occur outside of the normal price boundaries) both high and low, occurring in both the co-op and condo markets. These outliers usually tell more about the personal circumstances of the principals involved than about either the type of property or the market overall. Has the estate reached that crucial moment when just getting the damn apartment sold counts for more than anything else?  The buyer who arrives at just this moment may be getting the deal of a lifetime. Similarly, the buyer who has just sold his company and will pay literally anything for the trophy property he longs for is an unexpected gift to the seller who has listed that property at a price unjustified by all the comparable sales.

As my wife says, the world divides into two types of people: those who brag about how much they spent and those who brag about how little they spent. Both types buy real estate, but what real estate they buy, and for how much, should never be a gauge by which to judge the market as a whole.

In June, 1980, as a 28 year old doctoral student with a two year old and a baby on the way, I got my real estate license in order to make some money while I completed my Ph.D. At that time the overriding perception of Manhattan real estate agents was one of ladies draped in mink carrying a bunch of keys. Getting a real estate license then (as now) presented almost no barrier for entry; you needed only to take a ridiculously simple state test and endure a mind-numbingly dull and uninformative 45 hour course. I survived both and went to work as a residential broker, not yet understanding that real estate would eat my life.

Brokerage was a very different job in the days before widespread computer use. We had listings, we advertised them in the paper, and buyers came to us for information about what was available. While negotiating and organizational skills were important to success, even the least skilled among us had the keys to the kingdom: file drawers filled with cards containing listing information. There were almost no exclusive listings so there was no co-broking. Buyers had no access to information about what was for sale except through us.

Over the years I have watched an extraordinary step by step transformation in our industry. As real estate firms started to proliferate, the notion of branding crept into the mix. How would we distinguish ourselves one from another? Marketing, which had been limited to placing classifeds ads in the Sunday real estate section of the Times, began to include magazines. Then radio and TV. As sellers began to give exclusives, the real estate community began to co-broke. For the first time, the possibility arose that a buyer could see everything in the marketplace with one agent.

And then technology completely rocked our world. With the rise of the Internet, brokers no longer controlled access to listings. Information of every sort became public. That change, with all its ramifications, forced us to update our business models and re-imagine our value proposition. If buyers did not need us to find property for them, and sellers did not need us to find buyers, what did we add to the transaction?

Our job, no longer information provider, is now more akin to investment advisor. Today the ranks of residential brokers are filled with former bankers and attorneys. We bring our expertise to bear on the many nuances of the purchase and sale processes. We have become expert online   and offline marketers of property and of ourselves,  brand building in both the personal and the corporate spheres.  We still show listings, and we still negotiate (although today more likely with another agent representing the other side than between two principals). We are still, mostly, paid on commission rather than salary. But overall, it’s a different world from the one I entered 30 years ago this month, with a far more empowered consumer population and a better educated and more expert broker force. And today it’s a BIG business!