As my wife so acutely pointed out today, the NY Times Real Estate section has been mirroring our life for the past few months. Actually, its consistently about a week or two behind actual events. Here’s how:
First, a little background. Jessie and I are currently looking at apartments to buy. When we first started looking, we thought that we would buy an apartment in Harlem because its up-and-coming and the prices are so much cheaper than the rest of Manhattan. A week or two after we began looking in earnest, the Times printed an article on August 29th entitled “In East Harlem, Developers Find The Next Frontier.” We laughed and also were a tad dismayed; what if everyone adopted the same strategy as we had based on this article and whatever deals remained would be quickly snapped up?
After looking in Harlem for only a little bit, we found what we thought was the ideal apartment – a 3 bed room 1000 sq ft apartment on 119th and Madison. It was bigger and more expensive than we wanted and needed but as an investment, we thought that it was a “can’t miss” proposition. We bid on it the next day and although our bid was accepted, the seller later that week made up (or at least we strongly suspect made up) some story about a higher bid coming in after ours was accepted and said that we could still have the apartment but that we needed to match the higher asking price. We declined and walked away from the deal because it was just too much. The very next weekend, on September 26th, the Times published an article entitled “3-Bedrooms Soar as New York Nests” which featured the apartment we walked away from as the only 3 bedroom apartment that is available in Manhattan for less than $500,000. Jessie and I laughed and said, “I guess that apartment is going to be even more popular now.” In fact, it wasn’t sold and its now off the market. We both think that the seller was fucking about and just wanted to see how much he/she could get for it. If the price was high enough, he/she would sell. I guess the price isn’t high enough yet.
We continued to look for an apartment, working on our own and with the aid of our broker. We have a very ambivalent feeling towards him because while we like him, we don’t love him and often feel that we are finding more and better apartments to look at than he is finding for us. True to form about a week or two after we started to feel this way, the Times wrote an article on October 3rd entitled Your Broker as Your Friend, or Maybe Not.
After looking at a number of different apartments over a few weekends, we found one that we liked alot and placed a bid on it. Ours was one of five bids but after a day’s worth of negotiations, it was the winning bid. The apartment is an awesome loft space one block from Washington Square Park in the heart of NYU’s campus. Its basically a big white box which needs some work so we would put in a new bathroom, new kitchen, new closets and even build a nice second level because it has 13 foot ceilings and we can – we saw another apartment in the same building that did this already and we were really looking forward to this design project. However, when talking about the building to our friend Keri she said, “Aren’t you going to be living above a restaurant?” We didn’t know – the entrance was on a side street and we hadn’t been back since the open house. So, Jessie did some recon on her way to work and sure enough, the ground floor has a mexican cantina, a coffee shop and a caterer. The apartment we “won” was on the second floor. So, once again we walked away from an apartment, although this time rather reluctantly. Sure enough, this past weekend the NY Times followed our lead with an article on October 10th entitled Rushing to Buy Can Bring Regrets on Moving Day”. This is now just plain weird.
Now we are thinking about simply renting for another year or two instead of buying because the market is so inflated. If the Times writes about this as an emerging trend, I’m going to crap myself and seek a restraining order.
