Three NYC Real Estate Stories: Laugh or Cry?

Sometimes, I think The New York Times craves real estate stories of a certain kind. After all, Gotham's biggest business is real estate. Recently, the alleged newspaper of record published three stories whose common denominator featured multi-million dollar properties.

The articles included the following items:

• The week's top residential unit sale was over forty-seven million dollars.
• Artist Jennifer Bartlett has put her Brooklyn home on the market for $8.5 million. She'll move to her "second home" in Amagansett. Hey, who said artists don't make a living? (By the way, a shout out to someone's publicist, as the story practically read like press release.)
• The venerable Four Seasons restaurant is essentially being kicked out of its Seagram Building site next year. Why? The landlord wants three million per year rent, plus a share of the restaurant's revenues.

Pool Room/Four Seasons Restaurant
(Image: fourseasonsrestaurant.com)

The Four Seasons piece, while alluding to its clubby atmosphere, notably left out some players' names. Also, it was interesting that not one financial titan was mentioned in the article. No hedge funds, no private equity, no big, bad bankers. Nada. There was nary a hint of the zillionaires who have turned Manhattan into a sort of Monaco-lite. They remain secretive buyers of real estate: we only know what price was right.

New York Evolving Into the Global One-Percent's "Safety Deposit Box"

My wife and I visited two native New Yorkers who moved to the outside arc of occasionally commutable distance from Gotham. They live an entirely agreeable life, with views of hills and farmers' fields from their first floor windows. Neither the husband nor the wife regretted their departure from permanent residence in New York. In their view, it was time to go.

We jointly noted how Whole Foods Brooklyn, where they lived before the wild real estate rush into the borough, was rapidly approaching Manhattan-level rent rates and ownership prices. A recent New York Times article observed how aspirational couples and individuals can no longer hope to live in "commutable" Brooklyn. They now are supposedly eyeing Queens and selected New Jersey suburbs. That sounds like retreat for those who imagined New York life consisted of living on Manhattan Island or the portion of Long Island called Brooklyn.

Part of the real estate squeeze comes from the rush of wealthy international buyers purchasing apartments and townhouses. Why should anyone care? Well, these buyers are using New York real estate as their tangible rainy day fund. A BBC report quoted real estate executive Jonathan Miller as characterizing the buying and construction frenzy this way:

I like to describe the phenomenon as: we're building the world's most expensive bank safe deposit boxes.

So how does your rainy day fund look, eh?