Douglas Elliman

Tragically, the Rockefellers didn't make it into The Observer's Power Families issue. But don't weep for the Standard Oil spawn: According to city records, Peter C. Rockefeller and his wife Allison Whipple have sold their four-bedroom apartment at 131 East 69th Street for $7,400,000.

(According to their 1987 wedding announcement, he is Nelson Rockefeller's grandson, and she used to be a broker at Douglas Elliman.)

The Brown Harris Stevens listing--which is now offline--clocks the apartment at 11.5 rooms, and brags that the place was renovated by high-brow classicist Peter Pennoyer. So naturally there's a 30-foot-long gallery that leads into a "wood paneled drawing room with a wood burning fireplace." Sounds flammable, no?

Then there's the "huge state of the art kitchen," which comes with an old-school butler's pantry. Most mysterious (and therefore best) of all: "Historically correct mahogany Pella thermo-pane windows have been recently put in place." According to the deed, the proud new thermo-pane owners are "super lawyer" Lori Lesser and Daniel Shuchman.

Click on the floorplan below and the cozy snapshot above for enlargements.

- Max Abelson

We reported last week that the Real Estate Board of New York will be starting early next year its own searchable Web database for residential listings.

Of course, the cost to the dear consumer is zero. But if REBNY's more than 300 member residential brokerages want their listings included in the new database, the price won't be so small.

According to one source, bigger firms will be charged $7,500 annually, while the little folks will pay $3,500. We called Warburg Realty Partnership president (and REBNY board member) Fred Peters for confirmation.

"That was certainly a proposal that was being kicked around," he said, "but it was one of a number."

Did mom-and-pop brokerages find the proposal unfair? (After all, the city's mega-conglomerates like the Corcoran Group and Prudential Douglas Elliman can afford much, much higher fees.) "No doubt there were people who thought that it was too much, and no doubt there were people who thought that wasn't enough."

Self-described "one-man show" Basil Ashmore is in the former REBNY camp. "I'm one person. If you look at Corcoran and Douglas Elliman, they have a thousand [brokers, at least]. So I think it's unfair I should pay 50% of their fee." (He remembered the currently proposed numbers as $3,500 and $7,000.)

"I suspect the proposal will change," he said. "But how much closer to fair it will be at the end of day, I'm not sure."

Back to Warburg prez Mr. Peters: "I like to make a joke as a broker: you know you've successfully made a deal when every side is equally unhappy. That's the point we're trying to negotiate toward: the point of equal unhappiness."

- Max Abelson

It's time for the quarterly reports again! And as always, the brokerages are breathing largely the same rarefied air inside Manhattan's still-robust real-estate bubble.

The headline is that the average price for a Manhattan apartment topped $1,000 a square foot to reach a new record, according to reports issued today by all four major Manhattan brokerages: Douglas Elliman, The Corcoran Group, Brown Harris Stevens, and Halstead.

Inventory is also expanding across the market--a worrying indicator as increased supply puts strains on the stratospheric climb of prices in the Manhattan real-estate market.

David Lombino of The New York Sun talked to real-estate maven Jonathan Miller, author of Douglas Elliman's report:

"With the inventory coming on, we are reaching a saturation point," an appraiser who is an author of one of the reports, Jonathan Miller, said. "It's significantly different from a year or two ago, when these apartments would sell the second they got built."

Mr. Miller's analysis shows a nearly 16% spike in inventory between the first quarter of 2006 and the last quarter of 2005, and a nearly 60% spike in the number of apartments on the market since the first quarter of 2005,when a hot market led to a record low inventory. Mr. Miller said that if the demand for luxury housing drops due to a spike in mortgage rates or another scenario, it could lead to a glut.

(Incidentally, Miller has rounded up all of the morning's coverage, so I don't have to! Find it here.)  read more »

That's Jonathan Miller, New York's resident real-estate expert, not the Gifford of days past.

Michael Bloomberg issued a doomsday statement on the New York real-estate market to Reuters this weekend:

"The real estate market is slowing down dramatically and we're going to have a problem down the road," Bloomberg said.

But the statement, which responds to one of Jonathan Miller's regular reports, prepared for Douglas Elliman, doesn't support Bloomberg's gloom, Miller argues on his Web log, Matrix:

Why, then, make a pronouncement that could be a self-fulfilling prophecy? Miller:  read more »

'From a political perspective, the city is running a large surplus ($3B) coming in part from the taxes paid by the housing sector and one could speculate he is positioning himself in the next fiscal year to lower the expectations of those would like to spend it.'

Hmm ... - Tom McGeveran

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