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.