Digs Update
As you know, we, at Digs, do our best to make homeownership more affordable in one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets, by sharing our commissions with our buy-side clients and offering reduced commissions to our sell-side clients. This quarter, in the 11 transactions we closed, we saved our clients over $215,000 in rebates and reduced commissions. We also signed 14 contracts this quarter and are poised to save our clients even more in Q4.
More than 60% of these deals can be attributed to referrals from YOU and we are so appreciative. Thank you all for your continued support – we would not be here without you!
We also have four new terrific Manhattan apartments we are selling now, three of which we have YOU to thank for! Scroll down for links to the listings and please reach out if you are interested, or forward this to any friends who may be!
The Market
With the stock market continuing to outperform expectations, we are witnessing perhaps the largest Wall Street wealth creation of all time. This, as you can imagine, is good for NYC real estate, as the health of the stock market is always a pretty solid indicator of the health of the residential real estate market.
And healthy the market is. Sellers are continuing to get good prices for their apartments, but buyers are also better able to negotiate discounts and take longer to make decisions and sign contracts. We are not in a soft market, as many buyers believe (or would like to believe), but rather a healthy market – a predictable market where prices are better aligned with technical valuation metrics and where million dollar decisions for most properties do not have to be made after one ten-minute viewing. While bidding wars still exist, buyers avoid them if they can, and they are less the norm than they were in 2014-2015. Discounts are available, but not deep fire sale discounts, even in Williamsburg with the well-publicized shutdown of its main “L” train artery scheduled for a significant amount of time.
StreetEasy Dysfunction
In other market news, on August 1st, in a monumental feat of cooperation among the historically fractious residential brokerage community, all real estate listings began being fed through a single feed created by the Real Estate Board of New York – dubbed the “RLS” (the Residential Listing Service). The goal of the RLS is to have one source of real estate listings in the NYC market syndicated to all consumer-facing websites in an effort to provide consumers with the most accurate and reliable data. Shortly after the RLS improvements were announced, however, StreeteEasy, the most popular consumer-facing web-based source of real estate listings in the NYC market, announced that it will not accept the RLS feed, paradoxically, because they do not believe it is an accurate and reliable source of data. And following StreetEasy’s announcement, in a pledge of support for the new-and-improved RLS, several major residential brokerage firms stopped sending their listings directly to StreetEasy, including Halstead, Compass, Town Residential, Brown Harris Stevens, Stribling, and Warburg. Although some agents from these firms have been manually uploading their listings to StreetEasy since their firms stopped cooperating with the site, some agents from these companies, which represent a sizable chunk of the listings in the NYC market, have not been using StreetEasy. This is a rather unfortunate development for the consumer since StreetEasy has been a fantastic resource for buyers and sellers alike, and, more importantly, manually-uploaded listings are far less reliable and accurate than company-vetted listings fed directly to the RLS.
At Digs, we have moved our buyer searches over to new RLS software, where our buyers get daily email updates of every new listing covered by their search parameters, as well as price drops. If you have been searching StreetEasy informally or know people who are, please notify them of StreetEasy’s shortcomings and do not hesitate to reach out to us to get your search directly from the RLS. If you haven’t done so already, you can fill out this simple questionnaire detailing your search parameters, and we will get your search set up so that you can receive listings updates directly from the RLS.
Digs Listings
Check out our currently available listings. Please be in touch if you’re interested or forward them along to anyone you know who might be!
South Harlem
310 West 110th Street, 5S
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Upper East Side
200 East 78th Street, 18G
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Upper East Side
321 East 89th Street, 3A
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Hell’s Kitchen
453 West 43rd Street, 3A
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About Digs
Digs Realty is a full-service residential real estate brokerage company specializing in home purchases and sales in New York City. Clients working with Digs on a purchase are eligible for a rebate of up to 2% of the purchase price, and clients working with Digs on a sale are eligible for reduced commissions.
For more information…
Visit our Website • Email Digs • Call Digs
