NEW YORK — Despite carnage on Wall Street, vacant storefronts on Madison Avenue and pricey restaurants offering "grill menus" (read: cheap burgers), some things remain unchanged in the great metropolis. The price of the average Manhattan apartment is still hovering at more than $1 million.
Signs of the inevitable, however, are everywhere, and nowhere more readable than in the Real Deal, a print and online magazine that mines the big-money, character-rich world of New York real estate as if it were a professional sport.
Here's what its intrepid reporters were chasing for the August print edition:
* A Manhattan developer may demolish a half-built skyscraper because he can't borrow cash to complete it.
* A highly leveraged apartment complex in the outer boroughs is on track to become a homeless shelter.
* A residential brokerage house fired its in-house masseuse.
The staff was also busy assembling a list of "the best and worst" ideas, companies and deals to emerge from the economic crisis stalking the city.
Really, there's no telling how the real estate world here will unravel. Early indications are: not gracefully.
At a meeting this month in the Real Deal's sparely (early-Ikea) decorated Manhattan office, Stuart Elliott, the executive editor, urged his tiny staff to keep tracking the behavior of developers trying to stave off meltdown -- and opportunists positioning to take advantage of it.
They'd already run a map of Manhattan apartment buildings with the highest concentrations of Bernie Madoff victims. They'd described ugly "divorce" battles between developers and their marketers. And they'd reported on a developer who got whacked over the head with an ice bucket during a dispute with his partner over a failing property.
Elliott also checked in with a reporter following up on an earlier story about lenders so reluctant to foreclose on developers with underwater loans that they "extend and pretend" the loan isn't in trouble.
"Push it forward," Elliott pressed the writer. "Look if regional banks are doing the same."
This is relatively new territory for the Real Dealers, many of whom cut their professional teeth a couple of years out of journalism school covering New York's historic boom. In just the last three years, $100 billion worth of New York property was sold -- and now many of those deals are in trouble. The Real Dealers are having to decipher new lingo to understand lawsuits that are piling up.
