Manhattan owners who paid all cash

i don't know what it is, but no way it's that high...

I would believe 40% of the total VALUE of apartments in manhattan were paid for with cash (just because for every 40 $1 million apartments there are probably one or two $15 million apartments paid for in cash), but not transactions.

Are you lonely? After you figure out the answer to this question, what are you going to do? Ask another question for more attention? Seriously hotproperty, it isn't even like you put boundaries around your question like a time period, or type of property.

When I was at the Post (I was a real estate journo before I became an agent) I heard the same stat --

phrased a little differently, as "40% of owners in Manhattan have no mortgages" -- you see that includes the category of people who had bought with mortgages and then paid them off --

but I have no idea where it came from.

I asked Jon Miller (of Miller Samuel) about it once and he couldn't confirm it.

ali r.
{downtown broker}

I think you've just been sold another line like "all bankers have $5 million in the bank" and "the irish carpenters are buying all the real estate".

People see the BSDs buying $20 million apartments with all cash and they translate that to associates buying $1-2m apartments with all cash and MDs buying $3-5m apartments with all cash. The truth is, even if they have that kind of cash in the bank, they aren't dumping it into their apartments to save 6% (less now) on a mortgage.

I expect the number of cash buyers to be high because many co-op boards require you to pay all cash.

i asked jonathan miller this last year. he says that it's not more than 20% mostly high end. he also said that the high quality financing that co-ops demand is a myth when you include insider dealings. (although i have no clue how common htey are!)

Actually, Alpine, very few coop boards require all cash, as a percentage of coops out there. Some have recently started allowing less, I guess to accommodate their owners' need to sell. I had always heard that 1 Lexington, for example, was an all cash building, and now it requires 65% down.

Ali made a key point: A lot of those debt-free coop owners have been in their apartments for a very long time, and are sitting on huge paper gains even in a down market.

Those owners represent something of a double-edged sword for valuations. On one hand, they are relatively unlikely to become distressed sellers. On the other hand, when the time comes to sell, they (or their heirs) have a lot of flexibility on price.

are those long term owners the ones that want to shift maintenance costs to the new owners by using the flipping tax? or that doesn't happen on upscale co-ops?

Co-op village on the LES has a lot of owners with huge gains since many of them bought before the place was privatizied.