Manhattan Loft Guy year in review: 2010 reader favorites

it has been a good year, no?
It seems to be That Time Of Year (so soon??), so I will finish the year with two sets of Manhattan Loft Guy 12-month retrospectives. Reader faves are today; my personal choices will be tomorrow, to take the year out with a loud noise (I am hoping for a bang, but may have to settle for a big thud). I, for one, think that there has been a lot of quality this year, but there is no doubt that there has been a lot of quantity.

Today’s post will be the 293rd of 2010, tomorrow will be 294. That will make an average of 24.5 posts per month for the year, which I think is pretty good for a single writer blogger with a Day Job. (Even with the holidays at the end of the year, I did not blog on only ten days in the last quarter of 2010, so I hope I am getting into an even better rhythm.)

Enough about what I think of Manhattan Loft Guy; let’s talk about you, my faithful readers … what do you think about Manhattan Loft Guy?? Here are the 8 most read Manhattan Loft Guy posts and the (so far) 4-part series that are measurable reader favorites.

These three posts are of the classic MLG here is a specific data point variety. In two cases, they probably had a link from Curbed (again, my thanks to Joey and Sara!) to juice up the hits, but that January 4 post was the first one after That Long Sabattical:

• January 27, "unspoiled" loft at 70 Thomas St sells for $511/ft 4,103 hits
• January. 4, American Thread loft sells on Groundhog’s Day, again 2,238 hits
• July 8, another sign that 2010 is not 2009, as 60 West 15 Street loft sells  2,466 hits

This one comes in at #3 overall, and is by far the most popular of the MLG musings about the Manhattan real estate business variety post. It was helped by links from all sorts of places on the inter-tubes:

• January 28, for rejected coop buyer: screwed? yes; recourse? not so much 9,099 hits

I never did figure out why this one was so popular, but it was also a personal favorite of mine because I learned that something basic about Manhattan that I ‘knew’ turned out to be wrong:

• September 3, no skyscrapers in Manhattan loft neighborhoods, but why not? 3,766 hits

This one was classic Curbed-bait: a late-breaking celebrity real estate gone wrong story, one that bounced around the blogosphere for two days because (the trail suggests) of a Manhattan Loft Guy post:

• July 27, foreclosure auction tomorrow for 25 N. Moore Street celebrity loft (UPDATED w result) 2,212 hits

This pair include my #2 and the by-far #1. They remind me (yet again) of the power of the loft sales data I have been collecting for two years … a resource about Manhattan lofts unique on the web to this blog … and remind me (yet again!) that I need to (a) exploit that data set more often, and (b) do more frequent quantitative look-back posts (note to self …):

• March 5,  data dump: 27 Manhattan lofts sold in 2007 + recently 33,698 hits
• February 16, master list of Manhattan loft closings is up to date 10,128 hits

None of these four quite make The List on the basis of number-of-hits (though one is close), but they are my first intentional and focused explicit series. The series earns a place on the reader favorite list because it has generated far more comments than any MLG posts, ever. (I have come to think of you readers as … shy.) Look for more in this series in 2011, as I will continue the experiment of taking A Big Issue and probing or prodding it over time.

The odd thing about this issue is that it is not clear if it is an ‘issue’ or if it is just a seasonal bout of local Soho hysteria generated by a media empire recycling an old issue for another round of circulation-boosting. Without further ado, I off you the Soho A.I.R. series:

• November 12, did the NY Times just write the obituary for the Soho real estate market? 1,904 hits + 23 comments
• November 30, how are Soho artist-in-residence articles like the Richter Scale in California? 522 hits
• December 17, real world impact of Soho artist-in-residence rules and Certificate of Occupancy enforcement, as the dialogue continues 116 hits
• December 23, back to Soho, back to 1970, with stops in 1966 and 1963 83 hits

At the risk of (once again) anticipating tomorrow’s post, thanks to all for reading this year. Tomorrow I will close 2010 with a list of personal favorites.

© Sandy Mattingly 2010