Remember when the upper East Side was the city’s prime residential location? That was before the Upper West Side or Meatpacking, or East Village or Williamsburg. Well, think about the Second Avenue subway, the F train stop on Roosevelt Island where Cornell-Technion is being built, and this week’s announcement that the City is swapping some land to allow construction of an expanded Sloan Kettering cancer treatment center and Hunter College Nursing School on East 73rd Street. The East may rise again.
Mortgage rates, on the other hand, are going down. The question is what it means for the sales market. Housing has never been cheaper to finance, but there is still a shortage of buyers. And most of the experts think the Fed’s recent easing is just a stopgap until Washington really addresses economic policy. The WSJ yesterday had a good overview here.
If you missed Wednesday’s ABO seminar on The Future of Management you missed our panel analysis of why and how the Bureau of Labor statistics found property management jobs declined from 2000 to 2010 (actually, there were 60,000 more nationally in 2008, but then the number tanked). Michael Wolfe pointed to productivity gains due to technology reducing the need for people, in addition to the obvious economic pressure to cut expenses in a recession. David Kuperberg suggested that some of the difference might be due to changing job classifications and specialization – he might have fewer agents per se and more lawyers or accountants. All agreed that a single agent couldn’t manage more than six or seven coop buildings and survive the board meetings.