January 6, 2009

Tuesday Blogwrap

Russell Street. Photo by zachvs from the Brownstoner Flickr pool.
Missing Brooklyn [Brooklyn Based]
Youth Court Starting [NAG]
Kitchen: Clock as Decor [Remodelista]
Carroll & Bond Streets of Old [Gowanus Lounge]
Circle the Wagons: RAMBO Under Attack [Curbed]

Closing Bell: FIPS Goes Undercover

FIPS goes undercover for a four-part series to expose the Target in the Atlantic Center Mall (or also known as "The Seventh Level of Hell"). What is your experience with the store?

Quote of the Day

I think we forget, with all of the negative doom and gloom in the media, that many people are still doing well, many people are in jobs that are thriving and, gasp, growing, and many people are doing what they would have been doing had this mess not occured. People are still moving to NYC to follow their dreams, and people will still buy apartments and houses in the neighborhoods they want to buy in. Seems to me that our media's hyper attention to the minutia of every stock market jiggle, every business decision, and especially every business and personal disaster story, has turned us into a nation of hesitating, reactive, quivering masses of jello. (Continued...)

— by Montrose Morris in Hey, Something Sold!

Continue reading "Quote of the Day"

Today on the Forum

Here are some of the topics posted on The Forum today:
Mortgages for a Co-Op Apartment?
Recs for Railings for Front Steps
Help with Radiant Heat and Steam System
How to Minimize Washing Machine?
Floor to Floor Temperature Difference

Four Days Until Dumbo Flea Launch!

We just got back from hanging our new sign in the 4,500-square-foot space at 76 Front Street that will house the Winter Pop-Up Flea in Dumbo for the next 12 weekends. The sign hanging coincides with two nice press items about the indoor market today, one from the Daily News (nice photo spread in the print edition) and one from The Brooklyn Paper; Crain's also ran something this week about it but it's accessible by subscribers only. The market, which will feature a selection of 25 vintage, antique and collectible vendors from the deep bench of regular Brooklyn Flea vendors, will be open Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through March 29. For more details, check out this post on the Flea Blog.
Today:
New Indoor Home for Ft. Greene Market [NY Daily News]
Brooklyn Flea to land in DUMBO [Brooklyn Paper]
Previously:
The Winter Pop-Up Flea Is Coming to Dumbo [Brownstoner]
Brooklyn Bargains Move Indoors for Winter [New York Mag]
Brooklyn Flea Finds Shelter for Winter [Gothamist]
Brownstoner’s Brooklyn Flea Winter Coming to Dumbo [DumboNYC]
Pop-Up Flea DUMBO To Open Jan. 10 [Brooklyn Eagle]

Streetlevel: Walgreens on Myrtle Finally Open

Luckily, the Walgreens at 375 Myrtle Avenue finally opened some time over the holidays because we were getting lots of emails asking about it and weren't able to come up with a reason for the delay. After a flurry of build-out activity last spring and summer, the drug store looked ready by the fall but just sat there. We can only assume it had something to do with the C of O.
Streetlevel: Walgreens Signage at The Clermont [Brownstoner] GMAP
Walgreens Gets the Rat Treatment on Myrtle [Brownstoner]

Call It a Wash on the Williamsburg Waterfront

The Williamsburg waterfront giveth and it taketh away. Yesterday Curbed reported that while the pier in front of the Northside Piers is now open (full-on slide show here) the East River State Park a few blocks to the north just shut its gates until April in order to save $40,000.
Northside Pier is Finally Open, Hipsters Can Still Freeze [Curbed]

House of the Day: 667 5th Avenue

This isn't really a house, we guess, but there ain't a whole lot of new properties on the market yet this new year, so we're working with what we got. This three-story brick building at 667 5th Avenue in ~~Park Slope~~ Greenwood Heights consists of a 1,000-square-foot retail space topped by two market-rate, floor-through rentals. The property, which traded for $879,000 in 2006, will be delivered vacant. The asking price is $1,195,000. Anyone care to hazard guesses for what kind of rent the property could generate so we can do the math on the asking price?
667 5th Avenue [Century 21] GMAP P*Shark

Co-op of the Day: 40 Prospect Park West, #6C

This attractive prewar two-bedroom at 40 Prospect Park West first hit the market last July with an asking price of $789,000. After a trim of $10,000 in October, the top-floor pad got a more serious reduction last week to $725,000. There's some tough competition though: Apartment #6K, a two-bedroom FSBO we featured in September, has also reduced its asking price to $725,000, a situation we can only believe has led to some chilly elevator rides to the 6th floor.
40 Prospect Park West, #6C [Brown Harris Stevens] GMAP P*Shark
COTD: 40 Prospect Park West, #6K [Brownstoner]

Restaurant of the Day: James

"Deep in the brownstones of Prospect Heights, away from the cafés of Flatbush and Vanderbilt Avenues, with their homelier crowds and everyday fare, James glows like a well-kept campfire, luring diners to an otherwise quiet residential block," writes Mike Peed for the New Yorker. "Husband-and-wife team Bryan Calvert and Deborah Williamson have created a resolutely New American eatery kitted out with white-brick walls, wide windows and a long wooden bar behind which barkeeps pour classic cocktails," says Citysearch's Joshua Bernstein.

New York Times food critic Frank Bruni recommends their roasted loin of lamb, "its powdery coat of pine nuts and rosemary enhancing the luscious meat without eclipsing it," and claims that "No bigger, brasher restaurant around town served me an heirloom tomato salad this summer that I enjoyed any more than one at James."

And Chowhound lambretta76 comments on a recent brunch at James: "I did the simple eggs with duck sausage; the duck sausage was outstanding. Dunno if it was made in-house or not, but it was gamey (in that good way that duck is) and perfectly seasoned. For $9, it was quite a tasty breakfast option." What are your thoughts on this place?

Creative Office Space Coming to President Street

The popularity of shared office space is on the rise, thanks in part to the latest round of layoffs: more folks need a spot to work, or maybe look for work, now that they don't have offices. Enter Brooklyn Creative League, a "workspace and a community of simpatico colleagues for freelancers, independent workers, and small-shop companies." The space, still being rehabbed (as evidenced by the photo), is at 540 President, between 3rd and 4th Avenues, and the theme is green: low-VOC paint, FSC-certified molding, reclaimed church pews for seating, local vendors, etc. Sounds like a good place to work, no? Estimated opening date: February 15th or so. GMAP

From the Forum: Termites a Deal Killer?

We are close to signing a contract on a two-family on the Bed Stuy-Bushwick border. The inspector found evidence of...More >

Read McSam's Lips: No New Hotels in Brooklyn

The McSam Hotel Group has made a tidy putting up low-end hotels in up-and-coming Brooklyn neighborhoods in recent years but that's all coming to an end. (Of course, the company's made even more money flipping properties in Manhattan.) "We were very bullish on Brooklyn — past tense," COO Gary Wisinki told The Real Deal. "Our hotels have done well, but we are very concerned with the amount of product planned for the borough." (This isn't exactly breaking news—Chang said something similar over a year ago at a Chamber of Commerce event.) One neighborhood in particular has been the target of McSam's affections in recent years: Sunset Park. Starting with the Days Inn at 435 39th Street (photo), the developer has a total of six hotels either finished or in progress in the area. Gowanus is also giving Sunset Park a run for its money: There are currently three recently completed hotels in the rapidly-transforming nabe and another six in the works. Much of this boom can be attributed to zoning that prohibited condos and rental buildings while allowing hotels. "If you had a dilapidated warehouse that wasn't good for anything else," said broker Ofer Cohen, "you could sell it as a hotel development site."
Sun Sets on Hotel boom in Brooklyn Nabe [TRD] GMAP
Brooklyn Hotel Buzz: Boom and Doom [Brownstoner]
Photo by Kate Leonova for Property Shark

Hey, Something Sold!

Here's a refreshing ray of light in what has been a pretty bleak few months of real estate news: Apartment #3 at 210 Berkeley Place in Park Slope, which came onto the market for $599,000 in late September just days after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, closed just before Christmas for $592,500; the two-bedroom floor-through has a maintenance of $525. (Floorplan on the jump.) In fact, it looks like it went into contract in less than three weeks on the market. Any other anecdotes like this?
210 Berkeley Place [Corcoran] GMAP P*Shark

Continue reading "Hey, Something Sold!"

Bungle in the Concrete Jungle: The MTA and 370 Jay

Who signs a $1.6 billion office lease when they've already got a perfectly good building at their disposal? The same geniuses who've managed to rack up a project 2009 budget deficit of $1.2 billion, that's who. The MTA, which has possession of 370 Jay Street through its master lease with the city, started vacating the building in 2001, and since then has let structure and surrounding subway entrance deteriorate into a "disgraceful mess," according to a recent newsletter from the Manhattan Institute. This despite numerous pleas from public officials. "For nearly five years, this building has been vacant, an empty shell amid the teeming life of the neighborhood and devoid of people, the area around the building has become a magnet for trash," Borough President Marty Markowitz told the Brooklyn Paper last October. "If people's initial taste of Brooklyn is a smelly subway stop and a dark, empty, trash-strewn plaza, it can't help but color their impression." The MTA now says it plans to renovate the building to the tune of $150 million and repopulate with back-office workers. Downtown Brooklyn Partnership president Joe Chan and Council Member David Yassky would like to see it turned into a small business incubator, a use more in line with the refurbished image of the Downtown area.
Blight by Government [Manhattan Institute] GMAP
No Love for MTA on Jay [Brownstoner]
Downtown to MTA: Sell 370 Jay St [Brooklyn Paper]
Photo from MTA Please Fix Jay

4 Percent Is The New 3 Percent

At new developments, anyway. According to The Real Deal, developers with a lot of units to move have been sweetening the deal for brokers by increasing the standard 3 percent commission to 4 percent, or even 5 percent. "It's the norm for buildings that were undersold when the crisis hit," said Michael Signet, of Bond New York. Both the Belltel Lofts in Downtown Brooklyn (which is now about 50 percent sold) and NV in Williamsburg have upped the ante so far.

Residential Rents in Brownstone Brooklyn Receding

After ramping up in the spring and summer, residential rents in Brownstone Brooklyn began to ease in October and continued to decline through the end of the year. That's the big take-away from Ideal Properties' year-end report. Not surprisingly, supply was up by more than 50 percent over 2007 for one-, two- and three-bedrooms; the number of available studios rose only 17 percent. With greater competition for tenants, the percentage of No Fee apartments also rose from about 2 percent to over 20 percent. Landlords aren't getting too desperate yet though. According to the report, "unlike their Manhattan counterparts, Brooklyn's prime neighborhoods' landlords have not started offering 'first month free [rent].'"

Open Thread

From the Forum: Tenants Driving Me Crazy

Okay, I admit this is venting, but here goes: I inherited tenants when I bought my building. They have a...More >

Manhattan Market Contracts in Fourth Quarter

While prices were only flat to down across various categories in Manhattan in the fourth quarter of 2008, the graffiti was on the wall in the form of declining volume and much longer times on market. “The worst is yet to come; there is a blood bath coming,” said Matthew Haines, a founder of the real estate site Propertyshark.com who prepared the Corcoran report. Corcoran reported a 30 percent decline in the number of sales from the fourth quarter a year ago, while Prudential Douglas Elliman came up with an estimate of 25 percent. Price data was not as gloomy: The average co-op price was $1.1 million, 8 percent lower than the third quarter but 3 percent higher than a year ago. Looking at prices of properties currently in contract, however, paints a different picture: Jonathan Miller said that these numbers fell a whopping 20 percent between August and December of last year. While real estate pros have a hard time agreeing on what the future holds for sales, they probably all concur with one comment made by Corcoran honcho Pam Liebman: “A lot of brokers are making friends with lawyers and doctors and all those people who were left behind in the heyday of Wall Street, three months ago.”
Striking Declines Seen in Manhattan Real Estate Market [NY Times]
Reality Hits Home in Manhattan [NY Post]
City's Housing Market Hammered [NY Daily News}

NYT Real Estate Classified's Redesign a Real Letdown

Without any fanfare that we're aware of, the New York Times launched a new version of its real estate classifieds yesterday. The result? A mess, as we found yesterday afternoon as we tried to look for House of the Day candidates. Putting in a price range of $500,000 to $2 million yielded an error message; narrowing the list of available listings using the fields in the left-hand sidebar was a cumbersome, time-consuming and often error-prone process. As one reader pointed out to us via email, you can no longer select multiple property types at once; in addition, her saved searches and alerts were wiped out in the "upgrade." The list goes on. All we want from the site is to be able to select multiple property types and multiple neighborhoods within a certain price range and see the results. This is no longer possible. Why did they do this? Our best guess is that it has something to do with trying to broaden the geographic reach of the service, based upon the prominence given to the initial search box. Unfortunately, they may have jeopardized a much sought-after local monopoly in the process. Or, as the reader who wrote to us said, "I would imagine that others, like myself, will be very disappointed at their new real estate site and be less likely to use it in the future. [The new site] is not in the interest of regular readers and users of The Times real estate site and searches." Let's hope they can rectify the problems quickly.