Open House Picks Six Months Later: 9/14/07

Oh come on, 3:23. The only place in NYC where there will be “tons and tons and tons of houses available” might be Queens. Good luck with that.

By the way, the “New York metro area” does not mean NYC. Duh. That’s the suburbs around NYC. Huge difference. Nobody compares the two on equal footing in any way. Except deluded renters apparently. And if it’s the suburbs you’re talking about buying in you’re on the wrong site. This site is for Brooklyn.

“For those holding out, what are you going to buy? This isn’t CA or FL with tons and tons and tons of houses always available. The better neighborhods and blocks of houses have very limited stock.”

I’m going to buy a brownstone or apartment when the NY Metro area Case-Shiller home price index stops falling year-over-year. It’s now -5% and dropping. For now, I’ll rent. NYC lags CA and FL. As the recession gets deeper there will be tons and tons and tons of houses available. Read some history. The better neighborhoods have limited stock now but that’s a snap shot. Keep the camera rolling. Unemployment, divorces, relocations, bubble revelations, etc., are on the rise.

I can see a movie in the works about The What, or at least him playing a bit character – perhaps in the sequel to Batman, when Gotham is down in the tubes?

6:06–

What 6:58 was saying was that he bought a place in 1997 for $170K, sold it for $1.6M, and put a downpayment on a $2M brownstone.

You’re saying that his brownstone will be worth $2M in five years, and that makes him a nitwit?

Yeah. Over 16 years, he will have made a million and a half dollars on an original investment of $34K (assuming an initial downpayment of 20%), plus he will have a $2M brownstone to live in.

Boy, sounds like a real dumbass. I’m sure he wishes he could be a genius like you.

When 6:58 says: “what about someone like me who bought a place in 1997 for 170k and sold it 10 years later for 1.6 million? then i bought something else for almost 2 million and paid almost all cash. i didn’t have to have a 500K income to do that. i make around 125k…perfectly fine for my 400k mortgage” to explain why you don’t need people to make a lot of money to keep property values high, I’m just mystified by his math.

In the first place, who bought his first place for $1.6 million? Someone who had just sold their place somewhere else in NY? No — someone who got a mortgage at a time when banks were happy to lend to just about anyone. And who’s going to pay $2.75 million for his new place — as if? Only someone who makes $500K or better. And there are nowhere near enough people, even in NYC, who earn $500K a year and want to live in Brooklyn to keep property prices as high as they are. We have been living in a bubble, driven by easy lending, cheap money, and speculation. It’s over.

And, like all the nitwits who post on this site, 6:58 thinks the experience of someone who bought in 1995 and held onto the property through the greatest price inflation in NYC’s history offers a lesson for people today. It doesn’t. It just tells us he got really lucky with his first investment, and he’s going to be really unlucky with his second. He put $1.6 million in cash into a place that five years from now is going to be worth about what he paid for it, and in the meantime he’ll have foregone at least half a million dollars in potential investment income. But of course, it’s always better to own.

you don’t think there are a lot of people in ny with those same circumstances?

i sure do. pretty much everyone i know.

every person in nyc who owned property prior to 1995 and held onto it for at least 10 years made insane amounts of money.

that is where all these people buying multi-million dollar properties are coming from.

maybe 20% of them actually make the huge 500k plus incomes necessary.