New York City, After the Boom

This has hardly been an era of extraordinary construction. Where do these people come up with this stuff? A few dozen larger buildings are built and they make it seem like it's the roaring 20's again.

Further on, there is hardly a glut of housing. The citywide vacancy rate is still well below 5%, indicating the housing crisis is still very real and that the "extraordinary era of construction and renovation, demolition and replacement" has hardly scratched the surface of a a now decades long shortage of housing.

Posted by: Polemicist at December 4, 2008 11:11 AM

Thank you 11217.

Posted by: Polemicist at December 4, 2008 1:46 PM

Prodigal_Son:

The closest thing you would find is data published on The Real Deal. They haven't updated the website data however since 2006. They still publish it however in their data book.

Street Easy is close, but it is hardly a definitive list and as I said yesterday - I don't trust their contract data. Wirenewyork.com has a great site where lots of posters discuss projects pretty much as soon as a knockdown occurs. REIS, a non-free service, does have national data regarding stuff under construction - but their NYC data isn't very useful. Elsewhere it is very good.

Unfortunately, data on new construction is really only of interest to people like me who write economic reports for interested parties. Even sites like Propertyshark seem more oriented towards small investors, and not people looking to put together future supply projections.

You just have to take a survey of the neighborhood that interests you, not what's happening, and pound the pavement to find out what if anything is planned for the sites in question. It can take a while for DOB filings or condo declarations to tell you what is going on.

It ain't easy, but that's why analyzing real estate is far more interesting than other financial assets - it actually takes work to find out the real truth. That's also why it just doesn't work well for a website. You can't just pull data from other public sources like Propertyshark does. You'd need to hire people to do the work for you.

On a side note, there is a lot of data for non-residential product. As an example, Smith Travel publishes a lot of reports on hotel related stuff. Their pipeline report is great - they tell you all about hotel projects, the projected construction schedule, how many rooms, and other fun stuff. It's about $500 a report.

The real issue I've found in New York City regarding residential development is there is little need to prove supply and demand - everyone knows the supply doesn't at all meet the demand. The issue is never if a residential property will find renters or buyers, only what price. The same can't be said for other asset classes however, so the data is a bit more valuable - so people do it.

Posted by: Polemicist at December 4, 2008 2:37 PM