Whats happening with residential foreclosures in the overall New York City market at the moment?
It’s an unfortunate trend. It’s there and we probably haven’t seen the worst of it yet. I have heard there is a two-year backlog, and there is a lot more in the pipeline. If you look at all of the boroughs, there are close to 11,000 listings of distressed sales of all sorts, including foreclosures and bank-owned REOs. What are you seeing in Manhattan in terms of foreclosures, and how does that compare to last year at this time? It’s still not much when you compare Manhattan to the other boroughs. There are 23 scheduled foreclosures [now] compared to December ’08, when there were 19. In Manhattan there are close to 600 distressed listings, meaning foreclosures, bank-owned REOs, whatever. For comparison, Brooklyn has over 3,000 and Queens has over 4,000. Do you expect foreclosures to start spreading to Manhattan in greater numbers as unemployment continues to rise? I think there will have to be a rise in foreclosures on the high-end apartments. I can’t see how they are going to be able t
