Lesson 2:  Listings Marathon

Once I gave LaLa our location and price range, she told me she would put together a list of properties for our consideration.  Two days later an Excel spreadsheet arrived by email with comprehensive information about 127 different properties.  Included were data for the street address, floor & apartment number, building name, cross street, construction era, detailed amenities, doorman, elevators, pet policy, number of rooms, beds, baths, area name (e.g. Yorkville, Carnegie Hill), square footage, asking price, real estate taxes, maintenance and common charges, price per square foot, adjusted price per square foot, and a URL for any online listing information.  This document was an invaluable foundation for our search.  Scouring the Internet I did find a few other properties, and LaLa gladly added these to our list.  Ultimately I winnowed this down to our top 10.  However, to truly understand the market LaLa scheduled about 30 apartments to visit.

That was 30 apartments to visit in one weekend! LaLa designed a scorecard for all our scheduled visits by which to enumerate our impressions.  Parameters included location, size, light, view, exposures, and condition.  We also took photographs to capture salient features and guide our comparisons.  LaLa was able to work around open-houses, coordinate with various agents, and even gain entrance when neither was available.  She accompanied us for many of these visits.  Otherwise, we were shepherded by her capable and gallant aide-de-camp, Jean.  If I found another place worth a visit, Jean would retreat to the relative quiet in the recess of a store window and call ahead.  We’d power walk, pingponging up and down the UES.  If necessary we jumped in and out of taxis, yet always managed to keep on schedule. Along the way LaLa and Jean gave us their honest opinions.  

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What follows will be a series of lessons we learned from LaLa on our quest for a condo.  As lessons are added, the narrative will appear to build in reverse order.  I hope readers who find this later will scroll down to beginning.

Lesson 1:  I didn’t know I needed an agent.

I figured all the information I needed was on the Internet and I would just click away.  Silly me.  My search began innocently enough.  My daughter has been throwing money out the window at nearly $1600 a month for a nice enough studio on the UES.  Her lease was up in a few months, and the stars seemed to be aligning in the real estate market.  To address the economic correction, prices were falling from their nonsensical highs, mortgage rates were attractively low, and there was an unusual accumulation of inventory.  A recently converted condo was only a block away from my daughter’s current location.  We could move her in on a dolly. 

So began our quest.  Three units in that building were available from the sponsor.  With Google Earth I was nearly able to peer through the windows, then realized why these were still unsold.  A unit on the second floor had a façade that shrunk the windows.  A higher unit was over the entrance to the parking garage, and the soot stained façade bode poorly for fresh air.  Nonetheless, I made an appointment with the sponsor to take a look.

There was one resale in the building, but I couldn’t get any useful details from the Internet.  Stymied, I left my contact information on a site that offered access to a listing for this unit.    Within an hour, LaLa Wang was calling me.

It was so soon after I had made an appointment with the sponsor, I thought it was someone else from that office.  Nope; it was LaLa, eager to part the Nile on my trek to the Promised Land. 

We discussed the motivation for my search, and my parameters.  These were based on my initial point of reference, the price and location of the condo up the street.  My daughter wants to stay on the UES.  The prospect of moving more that a few blocks evoked:  “But the people in the bagel store know me!”  I reassured her there was a bagel store every 4 blocks, like every other essential business that repeats throughout the city.

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