Property Grunt

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Tables have turned and a call for carnival

I read about this in the New York Times and it was also mentioned in curbed
Co-op Sales Online

GOV. GEORGE E. PATAKI signed a bill into law on Wednesday that allows the city to make the price of co-op apartment sales public for the first time, a spokeswoman at his office said. The city’s Department of Finance said it expected to begin posting sales prices online on the Automated City Register Information System, or Acris, next Friday.

Access to the database is available through the city’s Web site, nyc.gov. To find out how much a co-op sold for, you must enter the block and lot number of the building, also available on Acris. Under the law, the city can disclose prices from sales that closed as far back as January 2003, but at first, data will be available only from January 2004 onward, a Finance Department spokesman said.


One of the key assets of a broker is information and unless you knew somone one in a co-op building or was on the board, when it came how much something closed for you had to talk to the broker. Now with this new law, brokers are in a very vulnerable position.

The majority of residential apartments in Manhattan are co-ops and now instread of going to a broker for information you can just go to ACRIS. You can figure out if asking is complete BS or is actually a good deal. What this means now is that brokers have to really be careful in presenting their information.

On a lighter note, I am still calling for entries for the Carnival of Blogs. Feel free to present your entry at this link. The current focus is on buyers and sellers and how they are current status in this market. However I am open to anything real estate related. I am curious to see what the consensus is about the downturn in the market. How bad do we all think it is going to be.?