Who to listen to?

A: IT DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU WANT TO HEAR.

It’s that time again. All the responsible communicators of our industry analyze the “quarterly reports”, and educate the consumer about where things are……supposedly. The problem is that none of them reflect the same parameters of information.

CORE is the first company that started a Realtime Report that reflects CONTRACT SIGNED data, and not CLOSED SALES data. Simply, this means we reflect data from a specific time in the market when deals are being consummated, not data from a broad time period from months (or years) ago on negotiated deals that happen to close in the same period. This is why we see a lot of data that trails the market by as much as a year or more, and remains inconsistent to what brokers, buyers, and sellers are experiencing in Real Time!

Here’s this past Quarter’s Realtime Report.

The bottom is staring you in the face

Hindsight is not always 20/20………. and it’s amazing how quickly things turn. For better or worse.

It has been 2 years since the sub prime mortgage industry credit crunch rippled through the globe.

It has been 18 months since the collapse of Bear Stearns.

It has been a year since the fall of Lehman Brothers.

The Manhattan residential market has lost almost 50% value in some sectors since its peak in 2007. A drop that came quicker and more dramatically than ever before. Yes, even more than Black Monday 1987.

Crains’ Amanda Fung covered a story yesterday about the recent activity over the summer. My opinion is that the value of the market has levelled off, and once banks start lending again (hopefully soon), the velocity of deals will pick up. 

Next year this time, there will be a number of people who will be saying “I could have…………. I would have……….I should have!”

……..in spite of a falling market. I contend that some of the most creative thinkers and innovators have come to the surface with their best work in times that seem dire. Some of history’s greatest works come at times that seem the most depressed. Art and commerce act independantly.

Axis Mundi has designed an alternative to Jean Nouvel design for the Hines site on 53rd Street next to MOMA. While it has received some unfounded criticism for trying to replace an already well conceived design , I applaud this work. This type of creative process is what pushes the boundaries of the ordinary and evokes ideas that will ultimately advance our status quo.

John Beckmann sent me this email today, and has graciously allowed me to post it here below.

New York, NY July 15, 2009 — As the city takes stock in a post-boom era, architect John Beckmann sees this as the time to rethink the tall buildings that have become synonymous with New York City’s identity.

“Instead of disguising the rich potential of towers that have a mix of uses, we looked for a way to express that diversity,” Beckmann noted. The firm used parametric computer-modeling software to test a wide range of possibilities. Out of this iterative process, Beckmann and his firm, Axis Mundi, proposes a new way to organize and express tall buildings: the Vertical Neighborhood.

“A more diverse, complex, heterogeneous, and environmentally minded city need no longer be represented on its skyline by one-note architecture that makes a singular visual image and little else,” explained John Beckmann, the founder of Axis Mundi, a Manhattan-based architecture firm.

Rethinking Hines Tower Site
Beckmann proposes a conceptual alternative to business-as-usual, choosing the site of the proposed 53W53rd, among the city’s largest skyscraper proposals in one of the most overbuilt parts of Midtown. Hines, the developer, engaged Paris architect Jean Nouvel, who designed an 82-story hotel and residential tower higher than the Chrysler Building. The site was purchased from the Museum of Modern Art with the proviso that the project would house additional gallery space for the museum.

The Axis Mundi proposal is timely since the Hines MoMA tower is currently moving through the city’s Urban Land Use Review Process (ULURP).

Flexible Floors, Open to Views
The architectural diversity Beckmann envisions starts with a double-ring, multi-level floor-plan unit, anchored by two cores that run the full height of the building, containing elevators, stairs and other vertical services.

The ring units called “SmartBlocks” make possible a wide variety of floor plans. Single-unit layouts can mix with duplex, or triplex layouts. The units can shift in and out, adding rich texture to the surface, creating vertical garden space, and linking the units in unique ways.

The malleability of the ring units accommodates living and working, extended families, and new forms of tenancy and ownership. Any grouping of these could be purposed for a hotel. The building is enriched by the multiplicity of forms and textures people create within their vertical neighborhoods.

By varying the mix of the floor plan units, the Axis Mundi design leaves space for vertical fissures that move irregularly up the tower. These bring light and breezes into the open centers of the double-ring units and frame spectacular, theatrical vistas to the city through the building’s own structure. Neighbors can see and greet each other along spacious bridges and balconies rather than scurry by each other in long, dark hallways.

Fitting In With Porous, Richly Variegated Surface
“Historically, the skyscraper was a unitary, homogeneous form that reflected the generic, flexible office space it contained,” Beckmann says. “The Vertical Neighborhood is more organic and more flexible–an assemblage of disparate architectural languages. It reflects an emerging reality for tall buildings as collections of domestic elements: dwellings, neighborhoods, streets.”

Axis Mundi has conceived the tower at a scale akin to, rather than dramatically exceeding, the heights of this very densely built-up Midtown neighborhood. The richly modeled surface and the fissures of space help to reduce the structure’s apparent scale and join it more seamlessly to a neighborhood that mixes offices and residential towers, brownstones, apartment buildings, hotels, and clubs.

A dramatic through-block public arcade connects W. 53rd and W. 54th streets, offering access to new MoMA galleries on up to three levels above. Contiguous with the museums’ existing exhibit space, the galleries twine back on themselves, like a Möbius strip.

Above that, Axis Mundi sets aside a three-story-high volume that can be developed as a community-gathering space.

Their proposal seeks to inform the discussion of it and other tall buildings. “The design reinforces the urban identity of tall buildings,” observes Beckmann. “It suggests new expressive possibilities in an urbanism of difference rather than of homogeneity.

In a city where more than 300 languages are spoken, architecture can celebrate that diversity rather than see it as a problem that must be solved.”
Height: approx. 600 ft
Floors: 50 above (2 below)
Building Footprint: 17,000 square feet
MoMA Expansion Galleries: 32,500 square feet

This morning I spoke with Erika Schnitzer from Multi-Housing News and gave her my opinions about where the market is, and might be going. Read the story here.

Going up or down?

It seems as if every time I open the paper or go online there’s a story about how terrible the real estate market is and how we’re all doomed! Well, the mass media has been waiting to cover this story for many years. Some even wrote about the crash 5 years before the market peaked. Could they have had that much foresight? (See the definition of sar-casm in Webster’s).

Just this week alone NY Magazine published a story about “The Bust of Williamsburg” and The Observer covered the “Condo Doom” of all the supposed stalled projects in Williamsburg and Greenpoint. I know of a few of these mentioned that are far from stalled! The line between news and entertainment seems more blurry than ever.

On the other side of the coin, I find it interesting that the talk amongst my peers seems to be of rebound and exciting opportunity. Some are even Twittering RT@Corcoran_Group CEO Pam Liebman: “In June, Manhattan had 11 deals over $5M. Brooklyn had numerous sales over $1M & several townhouse sales in Cobble Hill” and RT@Corcoran_Group Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman: “There has been a LOT of pent-up demand that couldn’t wait anymore to take advantage of lower (home) prices.” and RT@Halstead Get em’ while they’re hot! Brooklyn Brownstones are flying off the shelf!

I am most intrigued by those who have no agenda. Matthew Barron is one of those people and he releases a monthly newsletter called Perspectives. This month he contends that “the current environment is the perfect time to consider investing in NYC real estate”. Read more here… Perspectives July 09.