"Steele, who faithfully turns to Jonathan Miller for market commentary (Miller is also a Curbed columnist), and Urban Digs for Manhattan real estate news, notes the plethora of local real estate reading options that have sprung up since Curbed launched. "The biggest change has been the massive proliferation of neighborhood blogs--some run by real estate brokers, some run by journalists, some run by folks who just love their neighborhood," he says. "There's so much more detailed, block-level information than there ever has been. I love it." "

"Certainly I don't see any reversal on inventory trends, so I don't see any mass strength anywhere. Clearly we hit the first comfort zone, and that's about 20-25% down, and that is how these things work, nothing goes in a straight line. certainly I don't think the fundamentals will reverse course and get better in the near term, I think they are getting worse. I think Manhattan will be in correction mode, so call it a counter-trend surge in activity embedded in a bigger longer term correction... We are correcting from an unsustainable parabolic credit boom, the nation went through, and now we are going through it, so lets just keep it real."

"Noah Rosenblatt, a vice president of Halstead Property, writes UrbanDigs, which started in 2005. From the outset he has tracked macroeconomic indicators like unemployment rates and stock-market strength to gauge the housing market. On the blog, “people can learn about me and how I view the markets,” said Mr. Rosenblatt, who worked as a trader before becoming a broker in 2004. “I tell it like it is, real time, ahead of the curve, as opposed to lagging quarterly reports that get spun by brokers.” As a result, he said, he has attracted a readership that over time has come to know him and to trust his opinion of the market. “It takes a lot of time to build something from nothing,” he said. “You can’t just launch a blog and get 5,000 visitors a day.” Now, all of his clients are people who have found him online."

When they are revealed, the market could deteriorate further, said Noah Rosenblatt, who publishes the Web site UrbanDigs, and who in November concluded that prices were down 20 percent from their 2007 peak, based on his own anecdotal reporting from his real estate business. That downward pressure will result because potential buyers will suddenly have useful hard-and-fast yardsticks by which to base their offers. Once they realize a co-op in a particular Upper East Side high-rise sold for 20 percent lower than its $1 million asking price, at $800,000, they might submit a lowered bid, too. "Just like in the derivatives market, there will be price discoveries, and new benchmarks will be set," Rosenblatt said. "It could create an adverse feedback loop."

How does it all compare to the ’87 crash?
N.R.: Deals happening right now are 15 to 18 percent [off the peak]. This hasn’t really come out yet, but it will. My clients are starting to get a little excited.
It sounds like sellers just have to be realistic. Don’t overreach; wait if you can.
N.R.: Do not fall for the trick of working with the broker who promises the highest price. People bring in four or five brokers, and brokers have learned that if they offer the best price, they get the listing.

The immediate impact will be seen in the confidence level on both sides of the transactions. On the sell side, it will make desperate or struggling sellers much more eager to lower their price or entertain a low-ball bid. On the buy side, I would expect more caution across the board. Some buyers will wait, some will price in the risk of downturn in their bids, some will consider walking away from their deposits, some will try to renegotiate done deals and some will simply put up a hard bargain due to the uncertainty. In my opinion, it is all about the buyers, so when buyer confidence gets hits hard, you will see sales volume slow noticeably. That puts severe pressure on those sellers without a unique product who have to sell relatively quickly.

While buyers are reportedly still looking and making offers, perhaps aided by low inventory, many are driving hard bargains; those already in talks to purchase properties are revisiting their agreements. According to Streeteasy.com data, the number of canceled contracts has steadily risen since midsummer, with a spike in early September. “Buyer confidence has been shaken, and deals that were very close are getting renegotiated,” says broker Noah Rosenblatt, who blogs about the market on UrbanDigs.com.

Manhattan inventory shot up about 14 percent in the past four weeks, according to UrbanDigs.com, showing that trouble on Wall Street could have caused a decrease in buyer confidence. Citywide, inventory jumped to almost 7,800 units from just under 7,000 in the past month.

The Manhattan housing market has gone soft, and Halstead Property VP Noah Rosenblatt predicts it will remain that way for a while. The housing market has been inundated with lingering overpriced properties, and to move property, Rosenblatt says sellers must move on from denial and understand the realistic value of their home.

While nobody is predicting that condo buyers will suddenly shift to co-ops, buyers are starting to think more about condos as a higher-risk product, said Noah Rosenblatt, vice president at Halstead Property and publisher of UrbanDigs.com. "You're going to have pockets of distress because of the severe credit crisis," Rosenblatt said, referring to condo owners falling behind on their monthly common charge payments. Still, Rosenblatt and others cautioned that the increased number of condo fee defaults could be just a temporary blip and should not be used to gauge the overall health of New York City real estate.

The dismaying thing is that company execs told Mortgage Banking magazine in June 2007 that it wasn’t driven by the “gain on sale” model, which involves the securitization of mortgages — lending and then packaging those loans into debt to sell to others. But clearly, the firm has been in the financial engineering game, and it is wreaking havoc. Citigroup analysts dropped their rating on the firm to “sell” from “hold” today (after upgrading it in January) due to expectation for further problems. “If we get through the next year, and Thornburg is the only one it’ll prove to be a miracle,” says Noah Rosenblatt, a Manhattan real estate agent who publishes the blog Urbandigs.com."

The third bear was Noah Rosenblatt, founder of UrbanDigs.com, a blog that covers macro-economic trends and their impact on New York real estate. He not only predicted a strong recession but said he's looking forward to it. "If you're a value guy, are you buying now? No," he said. "It would be like catching a falling knife. It's a credit crisis and we're going to see a lot worse before it gets better." For Rosenblatt, a recession would clear out all the bad loans and foreclosure problems, and then the market could return to normal."

Noah Rosenblatt is a native New Yorker and a former professional NASDAQ equities trader. Now a real estate broker with Citi-Habitats, Rosenblatt offers a wealth of advice at his blog, UrbanDigs, to help buyers and sellers get the most profit out of the New York housing market. His philosophy is that every transaction should have true underlying value and his posts often reflect the raw honesty that he shares with his clients. In 2006, Inman News recognized UrbanDigs as the "Most Innovative Real Estate Weblog."

Call Noah Rosenblatt a skeptic, but in this uncut interview, the creator of Urban Digs simply doesn’t believe the doom and gloom predictions some people have for the state of the New York real estate market. Though Rosenblatt acknowledges a slight psychological effect to the credit crunch that has buyers slowing down the speed they chase open inventory, he believes that the fundamentals are strong. He states, there is actually a decline in inventory of 30% from last year (tightening the market in the present), the weakened dollar means foreign demand and the rental market is bad. Rosenblatt claims that above all, inventory trends have to change before we can expect any downturn.

So, which is it? Irrational exuberance or irrational paranoia? Bubble or Biodome? We turned to some of the brightest minds in real-estate economics -- Glaeser, Inman, Roubini, Tim Harford (author of The Undercover Economist), George Mason University’s Tyler Cowen, and Urbandigs.com founder Noah Rosenblatt -- to come up with competing best-case and worst-case scenarios from now to 2010.

They take more chances and they're more aggressive, the kind of people who put more of their assets into living where they want to live," says Citi Habitats agent Noah Rosenblatt, a former Wall Street trader who now blogs about the market on Urbandigs .com. "They haven't seen a major crash and don't know that they may get salary restrictions or that their bonuses may not go up as much. No good time lasts forever

Urbandigs.com founder Noah Rosenblatt talks to Inman TV about his highly successful real estate blog and its well-earned credibility, based on content. The blogger also gives some insight into the Manhattan real estate market

THE GREAT DEBATE - Everyone loves a good tax break, but Citi Habitats broker and Urbandigs.com publisher Noah Rosenblatt notes that there can be a downside for buyers looking into buildings with a 421a abatement - particularly if they plan to sell their property down the line. The issue, Rosenblatt asserts, is that because the 421a tax break temporarily lowers a unit's monthly carrying costs, developers are able to charge a higher sales price for the apartment.

"A buyer will say to themselves, 'Well, I'm paying top dollar, but look how cheap it is for me to maintain this property because of the tax abatement,'" he says.

Noah Rosenblatt is the founding editor of the real estate blog Urbandigs and a licensed real estate agent with Citi Habitats. Quick Tip: You should plan to hold these properties for at least 5 to 6 years if you want to get the full value out of this purchase. Anyone looking to swing a quick profit will likely have a hard time here.

When Citi-Habitats agent Noah Rosenblatt started blogging about the real-estate market twenty months ago, his colleagues couldn’t fathom why he spent hours every day on his site, UrbanDigs.com. “They couldn’t believe it,” he remembers. They do now: At a real-estate seminar at the Marriott Marquis in January, a standing-room-only crowd of agents skipped seminars on mortgages and foreclosures to swarm a seminar on blogging, inundating Rosenblatt with questions. Sensing opportunity, they seemed eager to get online, and fast.

StreetEasy.com What they do: A real estate search site. Says it has 90% of Manhattan listings. Let's you do things like search for an apartment zoned for a particular school. You can save your search criteria and get an alert when a match comes up. See what's for sale at what price in any given building. Pros: "It's simple and easy," Noah Rosenblatt, publisher of UrbanDigs.com, said.

Inman News for the first time this year gave an award for the Most Innovative Real Estate Blog, adding a new category. The winner of this first-time award was Urban Digs, published by New York City real estate agent Noah Rosenblatt, who launched the blog last September. In addition to entries about real estate situations and questions, Rosenblatt offers live chat sessions with site visitors every weekday.