Fifth Avenue And 67th Street One Bedroom $3650!

This is a deal. An 840 square foot one bedroom with a proper entry foyer for $3650. E. 67th Street between Fifth Avenue and Madison. Elevator/laundry building and Central Park is literally half a block away.

South facing and fully renovated. Would be perfect for a couple.

Bags & Bubbles = A Huge Success

I just got home from the Bags & Bubbles handbag auction at the New York Junior League. We had about 150 bags to auction off -- including a Birkin Kelly bag!! Final tallies in a day or so.

More photos can be found on Guest of a Guest.

Looking fresh to death before the event.


Luckily, I was stationed in the fur room for part of the evening. Go see the guys at The Fur Palace on West 29th Street. They'll take good care of you.

Come Live In My Building!

There is an enormous one bedroom (750 square feet)-- on the 18th floor -- available in my building for $2650 a month (?!?!). At that price, it might as well be free. It's a sponsor unit in a co-op, so no crazy application fees.

Building has doorman, elevator, laundry, finished roof deck, garage and most dogs are OK. Most important: share space with Clan Millard!

Related: If you're looking to buy, the sponsor (guy who owns the building) is selling off most of the units he owned and has been renting out. No board approval and parents can buy for children. All units are renovated. Studios start around $300K, depending on the floor. One bedrooms start at $500K. Get your checkbook!

Full specs on the rental here.

Go Hops!

I'm off for the weekend to Pennsylvania. I will once again be reunited with Peppe and Val, my beasts who have been vacationing out in the country since Christmas.

In the meantime, some light reading:

A wonderful piece in The Hollywood Reporter about Bethenny Frankel, one of my personal Allahs, if only for the soothing effects of her Skinny Girl Margaritas.

Molly Jong-Fast's piece about competitive parenting. Which should remind us all that the Upper East Side is not the only part of Manhattan that has good schools. Don't forget the West Village or -- my personal favorite -- Murray Hill!

Everyone has been linking to this New York Times piece about toxic sugar. Enjoy those chocolate bunnies, y'all!

Best Seat In The House

Best Seat In The House, originally uploaded by La Pauline.

I Can't Wait To Read This

This book sounds awesome. I loved Pledged, so anything Alexandra Robbins does is solid gold.

Although I was never a geek growing up. La Pauline was always the picture of adolescent cool. ;-) Not to mention natural, enormous hair. No aqua was harmed in the creation of my hairdos.

This piece from Bloomberg pretty much echos everything I've been crowing about for the past four months about the rental market changing drastically from the past two years.

Free rent and paid broker fees are going the way of the Dodo bird. Welcome to the spring and summer rental market!
Manhattan Apartment Rents Jump as Owners Curb Incentives in Tighter Market

Post Race Sweaty Photo = Total Hotness

Some people sleep in on Sunday morning. I prefer to get up for an 8:00 a.m. race around Central Park. Today was just a short four mile hop. There's another one on Saturday.

Since the weather is decent today, I started strolling down Madison Avenue in search of coffee and ended up walking all the way down to Murray Hill, an extra two and half miles. This is what happens when I start listening to show tunes on my iPod.

This photo was taken literally less than five minutes after finishing in 39: 13. Decent time, but need to get the lead out. Also: a hairbrush.


The post-race, post-shower, clearly I found a hairbrush photo. It's a wonderful day in Murray Hill.

Rainy Saturday = Family Fun Day

It's raining cats and trees outside but while the weather was just an annoying drizzle, Clan Millard headed out and about -- to Appleseeds in Chelsea.

The Big Man et moi. He gets very excited at the indoor playground and does not like to sit still.


Tom has a little more luck.


Andre loves anything that spins -- wheels, gears, etc. I'll be disappointed if he doesn't become an engineer.


These were caught thanks to an iPhone camera. (And edited to remove me, since the world does not need to see me close up sans make up.) He loves the little car.


When you turned two years old, did you have a cake like this? Tom and I wandered into a birthday party that was being set up for roughly 20 kids. For a small fortune (read: $1,000 to start) Appleseeds will throw your kid the competitive birthday party of your dreams, complete with a cake that would be nice enough for a wedding. I love Manhattan.

I guess kids don't play Pin The Tail On The Donkey anymore while scarfing Carvel ice cream cake. That's bush league.

How About Some Favorite Jazz Standards?

As far as jazz standards go, "Dream A Little Dream" is very close to the top of my list. Mama Cass obviously did the most famous version. Ella Fitzgerald also has a nice one.

Up until 10 minutes ago I had no idea Bing Crosby had a version as well. (Thanks, Pandora!) It's Friday. Enjoy!



Pair it with this Louis Armstrong ditty (easily in my Top 5 of jazz favorites) and you've got the makings of a good happy hour soundtrack.

It's Tax Day!

Hope you filed in a timely manner. If not, you may want to contact these guys.

Excessively Large Sutton One Bedroom With Terrace

Every now and then I find an apartment that I don't want to leave. This is one of them.

The $4,000 one bedroom inventory is a fascinating set, and one that I love exploring. $4,000 - $5,000, incidentally, is exactly the point where one should consider just buying a place, because the cost of rent at that level is equal to what a mortgage and maintenance payment would be.

This is an 1,100 square foot one bedroom with a terrace on 55th Street right off First Avenue. Leafy Sutton at its best. It has two full baths, two walk in closets, a chef's kitchen with stainless steel appliances -- all in a white glove doorman building.

Full specs here.

You can find an even larger version here.

Jason saw this sign today and thought of me. Aw, shucks.

Happy Monday!

OK, the weekend's over and I'm back from my class. If anyone has questions about landlord/tenant law or how often a water tank needs to be cleaned, I'm your gal.

First: Read this wonderful piece in the Times Real Estate section about my former colleague Jason. (He takes those photos that I always post on this blog.) I totally remember when our office got that little studio and no client wanted it. When we got it the walls were orange and dusty. Jason did an amazing job with the place.

Second: Last week I lost a deal because of some bad reviews about a building Yelp. A building, I might add, that is owned by arguably one of the best landlords in town. We all know that people only write bad reviews on Yelp when they're disgruntled, crazy or all of the above. They should be taken with a grain of salt.

I wrote this piece for the Huffington Post two years ago when a similar incident occurred. Admittedly I'm bitter because I'm out of a commission, but the larger issue that's been raised is how when one contacts Yelp to discuss these bad reviews, they refuse to take them down, citing that they fall under the umbrella of Fair Comment. (I'm not sure how fair it is to malign someone's business because a super didn't respond to a call fast enough, but whatever.) Clearly, I'm not the biggest fan of Yelp, or any of these review sites.

Last but not least, a little cartoon for you Carl Sagan fans:

The East Village: Where It's Likely A Meth Addict Was The Tenant Before You

Over the next three days I'm going to be in a property management class. In my absence, enjoy these photos that one of my co-workers took a few months ago of a former drug addict's apartment in the East Village. Note bong on kitchen counter!

At least they were nice enough to take down the fake wall. Now the place is in line with New York City fire codes.

4

Murray Hill Park Avenue Penthouse Level Duplex

Oh, Murray Hill. Why do I like you so much? You're as vanilla as a neighborhood can get, and yet you offer everything I need: grocery stores, nice restaurants, and a huge park for the boy to run around in.

Also: you have apartments like this for $5800 a month. A two bedroom penthouse duplex with two terraces. A formal dining room. Two and a half baths. White glove doorman. Hardly the den for the post-college, Daddy's-Paying-My-Rent set.

Full specs and floor plans here. Who says Murray Hill doesn't have flava?

If there's one economic indicator that I'm obsessed with (and who doesn't have a favorite?) it's the unemployment rate. Moreso than new home sales or construction, the unemployment rate, specifically in New York City, affects my business directly. If you don't have a job, you can't rent an apartment. If you can't rent an apartment, then I make no commission.

This piece about the national unemployment rate dropping to 8.8% was good news. Since all economics is local, I'm even more pleased to see that it's 8.7% in New York State. It's slightly higher in New York City, but the data includes all five boroughs, not just Manhattan. The Bronx, which has a ridiculously high unemployment rate, skews the numbers.

According to this chart, unemployment in Manhattan is less then 8.0% While still high, it's lower than it was last year.

A few days ago Business Insider ran the following chart that also implies an increase in hiring.

This is the private payrolls diffusion index. When the breadth of industries adding jobs is as wide as it is, payrolls will advance.


All this means that as a tenant -- in Manhattan -- you can't belly ache that the economy is bad and therefore the rent shouldn't go up. (I've been getting a lot of that lately.) If people are employed, then their $3000 apartment from two years ago is now going to be $3200 or more, because the owner can clearly get $3200 from a new tenant.

There's another, more basic reason for rising rents in Manhattan: inflation. Prices go up over time. You don't need a Ph.D in economics to know this. Landlords are running a business, not a charity. To think that rent will never go up, despite the rising cost of heating oil, basic maintenance, local taxes, etc. is silly. While you may be renter, the owner is just that -- a building owner -- and he is absorbing all the costs of owning real property. If a boiler needs to be replaced or a roof patched, it will be reflected in your rent -- recession or no recession.

And that, mes amis, is why the brief, halcyon days on lower rents in Manhattan is finished.

This morning I opened an invite for a crawfish fundraising event in May. It's $100 a ticket for the all weekend affair, and the organizers are quite overt that children of any sort are not welcome.

I say good for them. I have a personal policy that if adults are drinking, children shouldn't be there. This includes boozy Sunday brunches and weddings. And yet, at every semi formal/black tie wedding, someone shows up with an infant. It's kind of awkward.

In New York, it's become politically incorrect to tell people not to bring their kids to events. At some point, though, common sense needs to kick in. There's nothing wrong with being a parent and being social. You have to get out and about. But I can't expect people around me to be totally responsible, especially when bottomless Bellinis are involved. So I leave the boy at home, with a sitter or with Tom. Just like my parents did when I was a kid and they went on business trips. I spent plenty of time with sitters, relatives -- and one time, a long weekend with the dentist -- when they were out of town. They had fun where ever they went, and I had a little adventure.

So kudos to the crawfish people for alerting hipster parents to leave their swaddled papoose at home. It translates into a better event for everyone dropping $100 to go.

GMail Motion

Amazing.