where have all the loft FSBOs gone? nary a two on NYTimes.com
Manhattan loft FSBOs are very rare
One of the topics on my personal gotta-blog-about-that list is based on that NY Times article a month ago about how for-sale-by-owners (FSBOs) in Madison, Wisconsin achieved sales prices comparable to homes sold by real estate agents over the seven years of the study (One City’s Home Sellers Do Better on Their Own).
We just don’t have the data systems to do any kind of a similar study in Manhattan, but I was curious about how many FSBOs there are here, trying to sell their lofts without an agent to represent them. So I searched the closest thing we have to a public ‘Multiple Listing Service’, the NY Times web site, yesterday.
the loneliest number, as Nilsson knows
I got about 700 results for lofts anywhere in Manhattan for sale between $4mm and $900k, of which exactly one was a FSBO! (Now I am sure that many of the 700 or so listings presented by agents are phantom listings rather than exclusive listings of actual lofts actually for sale right now, but that is another story. And many of the lofts actually offered for sale are new developments.)
You would think that 700 is a high enough number to provide valid and useful data, but I can’t help but think that the number of Manhattan loft FSBOs is usually much higher than one.
one is not 13%
According to the June 8 NY Times article (the link is above) the statistics provided by the National Association of Realtors show that 13% of homes available for sale in the US in 2005 were offered by owners without agents. In the seven years of the Madison study, the FSBO website accounted for 14% of the sales in Madison (and about 20% of the listings).
5th floor SoHo walk-up for $1.6mm
That solitary FSBO from NYTimes.com, by the way, is shy about the address. It has a bunch of pictures, but no floor plan for its “1,400 sq ft” and no address. But it is up four flights of stairs and in a beautiful SoHo location. Check it out at http://realestate.nytimes.com/sales/detail/25-NY51E18D . Heck, tell them I sent you.
Maybe I will blog about Manhattan FSBOs some time (including my opinion about the characteristics of the most likely to succeed FSBOs), but I did not want to sit on my little survey result.
why lofts?
I will ponder whether there is anything about the loft market in Manhattan that may entice fewer people than in the Manhattan apartment market to go FSBO, but I don’t have any brainstorms on that issue (yet).
Just a weird data point, for now.
© Sandy Mattingly 2007
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