What you need to know about the appraisal process since “there is no category for superexcellent,”

Understanding the Home Appraisal Process

By JIM RENDON

Published: January 11, 2013   

BEFORE anyone can buy a house with a loan from a bank or refinance a mortgage, the lender needs an objective assessment of the property’s value — after all, the home is the bank’s collateral for the loan. Assessing the value is the job of the appraiser.

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Illustration by Phil Marden for The New York Times

Appraising a home, particularly in New York City, is not simple. Similar apartments just a few blocks from one another can have very different values. The floor that a home is on, the kind of view or light it gets — each factor contributes to its value. The best appraisers are intimately familiar with the neighborhoods they work in.

Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel, says that with a co-op, he begins by examining the building’s financials: if there is likely to be an increase in maintenance or a special assessment, it might lower the appraisal.

 

Read the full story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/realestate/getting-started-assessing-the-value-of-a-home.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=realestate

While many buyers/sellers sit on the fence; New York rental market is once again becoming a "landlord's market"

Manhattan Rents Jump as New Yorkers Stay Put

Manhattan apartment rents climbed 4.9 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier as tenants opted to renew leases in a tightening market, leaving home-seekers to compete for fewer vacancies.
The median effective rent, or what tenants pay after landlord-sponsored incentives, increased to $2,970 a month from $2,831 a year earlier, according to a report by appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and broker Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate. New leases declined 6.9 percent to 7,998, and the number of listings on the market dropped 1.9 percent to 4,605.
Stricter mortgage-lending standards and weak consumer confidence are limiting demand for home purchases, leading to increased competition for rentals, according to Jonathan Miller, president of New York-based Miller Samuel. Tenants are staying put as rents rise and a limited supply of three- and four-bedroom apartments prevents them from trading up, he said.

The interior view of a model apartment is shown in New York City. Photographer: Rinze Van Brug via Bloomberg

Read Full Story Here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-13/manhattan-apartment-rents-jump-as-more-new-yorkers-stay-put.html

Williamsburg sales heat up

Three years ago, Williamsburg real estate looked like a terrible bet. Saturated with amenity-laden new developments at the exact moment when the economy plunged, the neighborhood looked like a textbook case of oversupply. Except that it hasn’t turned out that way. Today, the Williamsburg market, though still evolving, is looking surprisingly stable. According to the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, new condominiums accounted for 87.8 percent of transactions here in the second quarter of this year, their biggest market share in three years. Prices were up 6.2 percent from the same period in 2010. And the Corcoran Group’s second-quarter survey found average prices up for the neighborhood’s co-ops and multifamily townhouses as well.What’s changed? The emerging neighborhood has emerged. Older, better-paid New Yorkers—the 38-year-old Pitchfork writer turned ad-agency executive who married a banker, say—have supplanted the broke-new-graduate cohort. “As Manhattan gets more homogenized and mall-ified, Williamsburg is the antidote,” says developer Douglas C. Steiner (though, it must be said, the same labels are often slapped on the new Williamsburg). Some builders also took condos off the market entirely, turning the apartments into rentals. Price cuts helped, too, though it never became the fire sale a lot of Williamsburghers were hoping for. And with only a few new projects, like the just-opened 144 North 8th Street, joining the field, supply and demand look to be well balanced again. Here’s how four once-teetering developments are faring now.


The Edge
This waterfront development sold 100 of its 565 units from spring 2008 to fall 2008. Then Lehman Brothers toppled. In the two years after that, only about 50 sold, says developer Jeff Levine. “There was very little velocity,” he says. Since last year, however, there’s been one transaction after another here—252 apartments. Now, The Edge is 70 percent sold, and “on any given weekend, we have about 150 visitors in our salesroom,” he says.
Read More: http://nymag.com/realestate/features/williamsburg-2011-10/

New York real estate is on the rise

NYC leads way in recovery race

Manhattan market stabilizes, while rest of country plays catch-up August 01, 2011 07:00AM By Peter Kiefer
The gulf between New York City's real estate market and the rest of the country has always been wide. But that disconnect appears to be growing.

"Manhattan seems to be one of the lucky ones," said Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of Miller Samuel, who called the Big Apple one of "the best housing markets in the country, relatively."

Read the full story here: http://therealdeal.com/newyork/articles/nyc-leads-way-in-recovery-race