Home buyer tax credit expires today. Does NYC care?
The Wall Street Journal reports a “frenzy” of last-minute buying across the country before the home buyer tax credit expires today.
But are NYC buyers rushing into contract to save $6,500-$8,000?
BrickUnderground heard two different views at a pair of local real estate events this week.
“It’s basically forcing buyers to hurry up—people are jumping into deals,” says Jordan Hoch, an agent at Prudential Douglas Elliman who was among several hundred agents attending Greenpearl's two-day Real Estate Marketing & Technology Academy.
Hoch said he was working to sell a Washington Heights one-bedroom apartment listed in the $300,000s, and the buyers were eager to sign the contract before the tax credit deadline. They signed only after the seller agreed to let them walk away if they couldn’t tear down the wall.
But panelists at the Argo Real Estate 2010 Economic Conference, held at JP Morgan Chase's Madison Avenue headquarters Tuesday night, pronounced the expiration of the tax credit a non-event for the New York City market: Where prices are so much higher than the national average, it takes more than $8,000 to motivate buyers.
Of greater concern to the co-op and condo board members, real estate agents, and property managers in the audience was an ominous prediction about property taxes: Over the next few years, a tectonic shift in the data used to calculate taxes will push taxes on most prewar buildings up to the loftier levels of their postwar counterparts.
We will write more about that soon. It won't be pretty.
UPDATE 4/30: Read broker-blogger's Malcolm Carter's account of scrambling by NYC buyers to beat the deadline--and the possibility that latecomers will backdate contracts.
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