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Homes define New York City.  More than any of the cultural attractions the city is known for, the one feature of the city that sticks out in most people's minds when they visit the city for the first time is the endless – as far as the eye can see – ocean of buildings.  The vast majority of these are residential, and there is the fundamental New York City in a nutshell:  Gone are the suburbs, gone the typical city's dance of urban and suburban; gone the grassy fields at the edge of town... In New York, all is city, and thus all is mankind's culture. 

This overwhelming sense of a culture permeating all the physical space of one's existence shines in much of the world's memory.  Some are disturbed by it, but many are enthralled.  Indeed,…

It is, in some of the social circles of the super-rich and super-famous, considered a necessary status symbol to have a swanky New York Apartment.  You would expect that, in a civilized society, those who have more income than they know what to do with would be asked to pay higher property taxes than those struggling to get by.  On the off chance that you are more cynical than that, you might still at least hope that the homes of the mega-rich are taxed at the same rates as the average person. 

Welcome to New York City. 

In this city, according to one viewpoint that is often decried as hyper-cynical, the super-rich basically tell others what's going to happen and how it's going to happen.

Before you decide that such sentiments are…

There hasn't been a year like 2007 for Manhattan real estate in a long time.  And there probably won't be one like it for just as long.  It saw a confluence of conflicting trends and market events that were enough to make the most brilliant economists' heads swoon.  While the national housing market had literally its most devestating year since the Great Depression, New York homes shot up in value to levels that set new records in all sorts of categories. 

A new year end report Corcoran Group Real Estate has given us some of the most reliable data to date on the 2007 market. 

Perhaps most importantly, the value of NYC apartments and homes in Manhattan rose 8%, to an average of $1,105.  Which, as we all understand at face value, is…

At the beginning of 2007, when most mainstream economic analysts looked forward to what 2008 would be like, few of them got their predictions right.  They all predicted slower rates of growth, both globally and in the US.  But their predictions underestimated the effect of the subprime crisis, and for the most part, their predictions were quite off. 

That's a bit of an understatement, really.  For the most part, they got completely blindsided by the subprime crisis.  Sure, many knew that it was coming, but few realized it was going to be as bad as it was. 

The big thing they missed was the huge hit the big financial companies would take when, all of a sudden the liquid, easy-to-move mortgages that they traded back and forth became as…

I would imagine that at some point soon, the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve will start receiving thank-you notes from New York City realtors:  The falling dollar has made New York apartments an incredible value for those that earn their salaries in currencies other than the US dollar.  Even the Canadian Dollar is worth more than the US dollar these days – And when a currency called “the loonie” by its countrymen is worth more than the good ol' greenback, you know things have changed. 

But the cheaper it is to buy dollars, the cheaper New York apartments are for those that earn money in yens, euros and British pounds.  The lower the price, the higher the demand.  Hence why New York realtors, if they are the least bit…

Renting an apartment in New York City is definitely not easy, or cheap. In fact, up until recently, New York apartments were considered the most difficult to rent by Marcus & Millichap's National Apartment Index, which evaluates the 43 most populous rental markets. Surprisingly, though, a mild uptick in vacancy rates in New York apartments in 2007 has pushed the city down to the number three spot in the index. Currently, both San Francisco and Seattle are considered tougher places to get apartments by the good people at Marcus & Millichap.

There's one aspect of renting an apartment that New York City still holds the crown in: luxury apartments. The city offers more luxury apartments – both total and per capita – than any other…

For a good number of years now, renters of NYC apartments have had the extreme displeasure of paying the highest rents in the country.  A new report suggests that the city is entering 2008 with a continuing hold on the unfortunate and smudged crown which signifies its role as the most expensive city for renters in the country.

 The new report – by the major California real estate investment firm, Marcus & Millichap – suggests that, at least insofar as median rental rates, NYC apartments far surpass those any other city in the country.  The median, for those that always get them confused, is the number that is number that occurs most often in a set.  So, when we say New York City's apartments cost a median monthly rent of $2,922, what we are really saying…

The subprime mortgage crisis has extended itself throughout the economy. According the Congress' Joint Economic Committee, some 3.7 million homes will probably foreclose as a result of the crisis. As of August, according to their figures, 1.7 million of those homes have already foreclosed, and another 2 million are expected during the next two years. Some of the largest names in the financial industry are now subject to multiple lawsuits and are writing off tens of billions of dollars as lost.

What is most fascinating about the subprime crisis' effect on the housing market, however, is the economic geography of the market dynamics. Because so many of the houses that were mortgaged with subprime loans are in the same neighborhoods …