Jim Parsons

Jim Parsons of The Big Bang Theory has officially bought a luxury condo at 36 Gramercy Park. The asking price on the 911-square-foot two bedrooms and one bath condo was $1.975 million.

But Parsons and his partner, Todd Alan Spiewak, apparently bought the condo for $1.822 million. Broker Ryan Serhant told the New York Observer, “It’s a phenomenal two-bedroom in the condo on Gramercy Park…it was hardly even on the market.”

The building was made in 1908, and a feature to owning a condo in this Gothic construction includes a key to the coveted two-acre Gramercy Park. If you’re looking to be neighbors with Jim Parsons, or are looking in another neighborhood; why not call us? Give us a call at 1-877-852-6636 or visit our website!

President of China Hu Jintao

According to a new report from the New York Times this past week, Chinese banks are behind some major deals in the luxury real estate sector in New York City; contributing over one billion dollars in loans last year alone. These investors mean business and they’re working throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and beyond.

According to The Observer, “Mr. Hu represents the Chinese investors who have beat a steady march to iconic New York properties recently.”

But you won’t see much about Chinese investors in the media. They are strictly business. Managing director of Real Capital Analytics, Dan Fasulo states “It’s truly amazing how much they’ve been able to do without being highlighted in public.”

China has always moved forward in industry throughout the world; so it’s no surprise that they are now seeking opportunities right here in the city. The business people who are working on these projects are planning their moves carefully.

According to Xue Ya, president of the China Center “New York is the starting point for going global…Everybody wants to come to New York because New York is the starting point for going global.”

And the money Chinese executives are pouring in doesn’t stop at just real estate. It has also moved into construction, including projects like “the Tappan Zee and Alexander Hamilton Bridges, the No. 7 subway line extension and the $91 million Metro-North Railroad station at Yankee Stadium”.

It will be interesting to see the reaches of Chinese investment into the New York City landscape as time moves forward. If you have questions about leasing a condo; why not give us a call at 1-877-852-6636 or visit our website? A representative would be happy to help you with all your needs today!

Residents are largely mixed on the impact that the new campus will have on the city, but there is no doubt that it will transform a little known piece of the city. Roosevelt Island has been chosen as the spot for the new science graduate school, which is being developed by Cornell University and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel. Located in the middle of the East River between the Upper East Side and Queens, Roosevelt Island has benefited from a couple of condominium developments in the past decade, but these will soon be dwarfed by the world-class campus, which costs over $2 billion according to the New York Times.

The Times quotes 77-year old resident George Ohring, who beams that the island “can be a part of the rest of the world” thanks to the new school. The school will certainly change the island’s quite, small-town feel, which can be a surreal experience considering that the Manhattan skyline is visible from every part of the island. Amblers can be seen walking about the main road or buying fruit and vegetables from the stand outside the single subway station on the island. The New York Times says that the island is like a “quaint college town”, but there are usually few college students to be found on the island.

That will all change soon.

The new school will come with state-of-the-art laboratories, classrooms, a conference center, and student housing on top of current nursing facilities at the southern tip of the island.

Despite the thin actress’s physique, Sarah Jessica Parker has begun a search for the best pasta in the city.

For ravioli, she has already found the place–Gradisca, in the West Village on 13th street between 6th and 7th. The actress told the New York Times that the eatery’s ravioli “is absolutely gorgeous. It is light as air. I always tell people to go visit Gradisca because I think it’s such a surprise.”

She’s also fond of the restaurant’s pasta carbonara, which she calls “beautiful” with its perfect balance of bacon, cheese, olive oil, salt, and pepper. She is still on the prowl for the perfect carbonara, telling the Times that she has an obsession with it. “Like, I comb the Internet,” she said in an interview. “I call in advance to make sure it’s still on the menu. I ask for double portions.”

Gradisca is a great and underrated place to go for pasta. Opened in 2000, the eatery seeks to provide New Yorkers with “the soul of authentic Italian cooking.” The restaurant has become popular, and residents throughout Manhattan are happy to travel to the west side of the island to encounter the delights on offer.

When you go, you might meet Caterina Schenardi, the 65-year old who makes the pasta fresh every night, just for the diners at Gradisca. You may even hear her speaking in Italian to the restaurant’s owner, Massimo Galeano, who is also Ms. Schenardi’s son.

Her craft is not limited to ravioli; tagliatelle, tortellini, linguine, and a variety of other pastas can be had at the small restaurant.

Beyond Gradisca, The West Village is well known amongst city dwellers for its wide array of gourmet eateries, where the competition to get and keep customers is fierce. As a result, only the best survive, and only the best are available for those who wander the neighborhood.

Working with a disreputable real estate broker can lead to lost money and even homelessness. In New York City, where real estate works unlike anywhere else in America, this is doubly the case, as residents at the Hotel Chelsea have discovered.

There is the potential for a lot of confusion in that sentence. Hotel? Residents? Yes, it is not uncommon in the nicer hotels for permanent residents to purchase a suite to live in or visit regularly. The Hotel Chelsea is a typical example. A grand and historic property, the hotel began its life as an apartment co-op in 1883 and remained the tallest building in the city until 1899. In 1905, it became a hotel.

In the center of New York City’s theater district, it has attracted poets and writers for generations, including Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, and Dylan Thomas, who died in the hotel in 1953 of alcohol poisoning. This checkered and historical past has helped make the property more valuable, more popular, and more desirable amongst the jet-setting cosmopolitan crowd who can afford its markups.

The change in ownership due to the circa $80 million deal (the official figure has not been made public) has caused the hotel residents plenty of hassle, including uncertainty over their rights of residency and transfer of stock ownership. Gothamist is reporting that concrete had been poured down the building’s sewage pipes, and residents are stating that they have no idea what will happen to their units if the sale is finalized.

The city is full of hotels, ranging from the cheap to the ultra expensive. While most of the oldest ones have permanent residents, I suspect this historical throwback will begin to disappear with problems arising from eager developers, and the complexity of transferring ownership of a co-op/hotel/apartment. Furthermore, the growth of luxury condominiums in Manhattan–which usually offer more square feet per dollar and lower maintenance costs–will make residences at luxury hotels redundant at the very least.

At Condodomain, we always recommend the purchase of condominiums in which ownership is guaranteed and legally secured in a familiar and easy-to-understand way. Please visit our site or give us a call at 1-877-852-6636 to speak with one of our agents about condo ownership today!

In the past decade, the Meatpacking District has profoundly transformed, rendering its name more of a historical curiosity than an accurate description of a very hip and pricey neighborhood. The Meatpacking District, being alongside the Hudson and straddling Chelsea, has become a celebrity hotspot as well as home to several luxury condo developments.

A new development seems to be coming as well, and this time it’s not residential. Curbed is reporting that another warehouse in the “MePa” area (seriously, don’t call it that) is being torn down to make way for a new luxury building. The art deco building on 437 West 13th Street, which GVSHP.org is calling “historic“, is slated to be torn down and turned into a 175-foot high office building. This is after historical purist preservationists successfully negotiated with the city to lower the proposed height of the building from 250 feet, which the developers had originally wanted.

I can’t say I agree with GVSHP.org and the preservationists that the current building is a historical building worth preserving. While it’s true that the building was first built in 1936 to be used  by the New York Dressed Poultry Market, its architecture isn’t very interesting–or even noticeable. Who can tell when it was built from the outside? The prettiest part of the building, in my opinion, is the Atlas Meats sign, which is much newer than the building itself. This didn’t stop the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation from getting the building registered as a historical site, but they were unable to get the building listed as historically significant enough to save it from demolition.

While it’s undoubtedly true that New York City’s character makes it such a great place to live, I just don’t see how single-storey meat markets from the 20th century are part of that character. Very similar buildings are everywhere in the United States, so why preserve one in the city that made the skyscraper world famous?

Am I alone in thinking the preservationists have gone overboard?

One of the things that confuses outsiders and recent transplants is the concept of the microneighborhood, which is a reality in New York City, especially Manhattan. On such a small island with such a dense and diverse population, it was almost inevitable that small groups would create their own communities with their own unique flavor, like Little Italy and Chinatown right next to each other.

Because these neighborhoods are so small and so close to each other, you will often see a completely different area just across the street, and walking two blocks will transport you to another world. Some of these borders are famous even as they are disappearing, like 96th street between the Upper East Side and East Harlem, which was once the clear line between the two areas (and still is in many people’s minds), even if the UES nowadays extends well into the 100s, and will probably keep pushing up.

As a result of these small microneighborhoods, you can find enormous price differentials very close to each other, and a similar size and quality condo can differ by tens of thousands of dollars by being just one or two blocks away.

It seems that these enormous differences in cost so close to each other aren’t disappearing anytime soon. The New York Times is reporting that so-called “micromarkets” around the city are booming. In fact, what seems to determine the price of these overperforming markets is trendiness over anything else:

over the spring and summer, prices in certain pockets of property sprinkled around Manhattan and Brooklyn had rebounded to or beyond pre-recession levels.

These micromarkets could turn up along a particular avenue or even in a specific building, and they tended to be in what brokers describe as prime locations, in neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Chelsea in Manhattan, and Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope in Brooklyn.

In other words, if you find the right building, you could be buying into an upswinging trend. But trends change fast, so you could be buying at the height of a price uptick that will soon fall flat or go down.

This is why buyers into New York City need an agent more than perhaps any other city on Earth, and with Condodomain you can have an NYC agent who is an expert in the city and is supported by an enthusiastic team–all the while getting cash back on your commission! Why not give them a call today at 1-877-852-6636 or visit their website today?

Also, I might suggest a trip to The Little Lebowski, a Noho boutique that sells only Lebowski-related goods and somehow manages to stay in business.

You can see a full and official account of the competing designs here [warning: PDF]. What design would you have chosen?

As Zucotti Park becomes ground zero for the Occupy Wall Street protest, the small sliver of lower Manhattan has received a lot of attention from the mainstream media and bloggers who normally wouldn’t know anything about this small green space just west of Liberty and Broadway.

Zucotti Park is 33,000 square feet of privately owned land that is accessible and free to the public; since it is private but open to the public, people are free to come and go as they please, and even sleep there if they so desire. This is why it is so crucial to the protestors, who would otherwise be kicked out of Central Park, Battery Park, or any other public park in the city.

Built in 1968, it was renovated for $8 million by Cooper, Robertson & Partners in 2006. Since then, it has become a popular resting spot for tourists, given its proximity to Ground Zero, until it was overtaken by protestors who are using the spot as a place to sleep, chant, and hold meetings.

The park’s unusual name comes from John E. Zuccotti, a civil servant who held a number of administrative positions in the city before becoming the chairman of Brookfield Properties, which owns the World Financial Center and One Liberty Plaza downtown, as well as several properties in Midtown in addition to some in Jersey City and across the globe.

Before the 2006 sprucing, it was known as Liberty Park, a name given to it after September 11. Before that, it had an address: 1 Liberty Plaza. Since Brookfield bankrolled its renovation, it has been rechristened after the company’s chairman.

Brookfield Properties still owns the park, but an old agreement with the city allows anyone to enter or leave the park and stay as long as they like, and Zucotti himself has said that his company looks to the mayor and police for guidance.

The man who gave his name to the park has visited its current occupants a few times since the protests started–and according to the New York Times, he wasn’t recognized. “It has a kind of festive atmosphere,” he said of the Occupy Wall Street protestors. “You can’t tell the protestors from the tourists.”