Congratulations, Wall Street (and NY real estate brokers)!
December 18th, 2006 by Bea Chenowitz | No Comments | Filed in Commentary, Economy, Real Estate Market
The much-awaited Wall Street bonus news have come out last week, with Goldman Sachs announcing the highest annual earnings in Wall Street history, allowing the investment bank to pay out a whopping $16 billion to eligible employees. That is over $600,000 per employee, with some high producers possibly earning as much as $100 million. Other investment banks did very well also; Morgan Stanley said that it will pay its CEO John Mack $40 million in 2006, also a Wall Street record for a CEO.
Doing naked cart wheels are, of course, people who work at Goldman, and real estate brokers. Salivating at the prospect of money that will be thrown into real estate, Pam Liebman, the CEO of Corcoran, a large NY real estate brokerage, said, “When these guys learn what their bonuses are, we are among the first people they call…. They call their mothers, and then their real estate brokers.” (The NY Times, December 13, 2006)
For people like me who have been waiting for prices to fall even further, this is not good news. The real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuels has produced a correlation chart between Wall Street bonuses and real estate prices in Manhattan, and surprise, surprise, they are inextricably linked!
Brokers are already reporting brisk sales in as early as November (“Bonus Season’s Greetings,” New York Magazine, December 4, 2006). A friend who is a broker confirms that the past two months have been “very, very busy” for her.
While the rest of the country is languishing in a so-called “real estate freeze,” New York defies that trend and sends its property prices through the roof once again, beyond reach of the likes of us, who did not earn those bonuses.
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Tags: bonuses, earnings, estate, Goldman, Morgan, New, real, Sachs, Stanley, Street, trends, Wall, York


An article in the Sunday issue of the New York Times 
For city dwellers with children, there is always this dilemma of whether one should move to the suburbs. The case for the suburbs is pretty cut and dry: there are the obvious lifestyle reasons such as more space for children to run around, and also financial ones, like being able to send kids to great public schools where you don’t have to fork out private school tuitions in the $25,000-to-$30,000 range (per child, that is).
Thank you, Josh, for inviting me to join the Biggerpockets.com blog community! And I also wanted to congratulate him on his recent nuptials & honeymoon to Thailand & Hong Kong. I’ve spent some time there myself, & they are such amazing places to visit, Thailand with its exquisite beaches & Hong Kong with its fast-paced vitality. Speaking of fast-paced, vital cities, I’m writing from New York. Love it or hate it, there’s always something happening here! It’s fun to be living here, & although the competitive nature of the place gets to me sometimes, I still can’t imagine living anywhere else.
I wanted to extend a warm welcome to Bea Chenowitz, a new contributor to our blog. Bea is a wonderful writer from New York, and will help share her unique views of this crazed real estate market. 
Joshua Dorkin


Charles Feldman

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