THE APPLE, PEELED
MOST RECENT ARTICLES
Real Estate After the Pandemic with E|A Team Member, Inez Gomez
Don’t let her short tenure as a licensed real estate salesperson fool you into thinking Inez Gomez doesn’t know the ins and outs of New York real estate. With more than 16 years of mortgage banking under her belt, this New York City native knows homes and she knows...
What Happened in June 2021 in New York City Real Estate
Can you believe it? The year following the largest disruption of our lifetime is just half over, and the resurgence we’ve seen in the City has been nothing short of phenomenal. Not to mention a huge relief. The one thing it’s not? A surprise. Perseverance is the...
Which Mortgage Loan Officers are the Most Profitable? And, are FHA Loans Appropriate in New York City?
In this space I often try to provide a perspective that would be difficult to find published anywhere else, mostly because the subject of mortgage finance just isn’t stimulating enough to attract an audience. For most people, it’s a boring subject that you only really...
AT THE CORE
Can You Hear Me Now?
The average real estate agent has more conversation partners per year than non-agents. That must be true. Last week, we averaged over 157 conversations per day, give or take. Some were routine arrangement-making conversations, but other conversations were more complex...
Timing the Market in Westchester
The math says homeowners in suburbs like Westchester County have all the leverage and they might earn a small fortune if they sold their home now. But some people haven’t had time to figure out where they’d go if they sold. Fortune favors the bold. What’s bold?...
Manhattan Real Estate is on Fire. The Good Kind of On Fire.
February heated the hell out of the New York City real estate market. Anecdotally, several of our clients were operating with a heightened sense of urgency because they found themselves bidding against several other parties. It seems like less than a month ago when...
Pent-up Demand Not So Pent-Up Anymore
All the pent-up Demand showed up, and it might have just kicked down the door. That’s the sensation we’re getting anyway. There’s a new energy in Manhattan and it’s palpable, at least inside the actively listed condo and coop units that weren’t used to having visitors...
Technically Speaking, We’re Making Some Upgrades
We’ve always thought technology was sexy as hell. Even the packaging is hot. And we love that new phone smell! Sure, technology has its flaws… For instance, human beings, in general, would probably be in better harmony with one another if social media was erased from...
Facetime is Good, But it’s Not as Good as Real Life Face Time
Ya know what we miss? Connecting face-to-face with other people. A good conversation. A smile, unmasked. That’s good for the soul. It’s good for the mind too. Significantly less impressive, but still noteworthy on some level, it also happens to be good for...
ASK THE EXPERTS
Ask the Experts: Ambush Q&A: Property Searching with ESPINAL|ADLER Team member Preston Maguire
Team members never know the questions in advance, and they’re never told that they’re being interviewed until the moment of the interview. Once asked, they are given up to 60 seconds to think about and answer each question. These are their candid answers, surely the...
Ambush Q&A: Negotiating with Marie Espinal
Apple Peeled Question: Do New York City real estate negotiations ever get contentious? Are they always professional? Espinal: They 100% can get contentious. What is most unrealized both on the sell side and the buy-side, what’s just as important as your negotiation...
Ask the Experts Ambush Edition with Espinal|Adler partner Jeff Adler
Question #1: From a qualitative standpoint, what is something that home buyers don’t think about enough during their search for a home? Adler response: The age and quality of the finishes and appliances. They don’t think about that enough. Which is why it’s good to...
Mortgage Lenders Tighten Their Belts Another Notch
Since the start of the pandemic, mortgage lenders in New York City have tightened their guidelines making it more difficult to qualify for mortgage financing on a property located in any of the 5 boroughs. The Apple Peeled reported on this extensively in the closing...
Non-Compliance with Mortgage Guidelines Could sink the Value of Your Condo or Co-op Unit
Hypothesis: A buyer’s access to mortgage financing in a specific building, (condo or co-op), has a direct impact on the value of every single unit in that building. We’re confident in that assessment, even though we can’t necessarily quantify the impact....
You Might Want to Know This
Things We Heard When We Put Our Ears to the Ground: Mortgage Guidelines are tightening up Chase this week planned to reduce the maximum Loan to Value (LTV) down to 70% on all its jumbo mortgage products for properties in New York City. That means, if you plan to...
MORTGAGE MINUTE
WITH MATT JABLONSKI
Concessions and Club Sandwiches
There are a lot of layers in every mortgage transaction. It’s at least a club sandwich. The seller’s concession is one of them. Maybe it’s the bacon. Since sandwich humor can only take me so far, let’s get back to basics. The seller’s concession is a very effective...
Somebody Went and Changed the URLA
“It’s a train wreck,” one seasoned loan officer told me of the mortgage industry’s new Uniform Residential Loan Application (URLA). “It’s a nightmare,” said another. Personally, I’m not sure what to think quite yet. Perhaps it’s a nightmare about a train wreck, but...
Why Does 625,500 Ring a Bell?
Six Twenty-Five, Five Hundred. Oh man! That’s a number I used to have to remember. I saw that number on a screen the other day, and it felt like I found an old memory I lost somewhere in the back corner of my brain like a tchotchke in a bin in the attack. 625,500....
Study: Mortgage Bankers Kill 133 Trees
In just my first year in the mortgage business, just a little after the turn of the century, me and the people I worked with killed over 133 trees. Usually, people are all “Loosey-Goosey” when they throw around numbers like that, fudging stats to prove whatever point...
MOLINGO (Mortgage Lingo): The Documentation Dilemma
There isn’t anything fun about applying for a mortgage – except for the part where you close and it’s over. The process is inefficient. The whole thing takes too damn long. And the amount of documentation they ask for could keep a small house warm in the middle of...
Dear 8th Grade Self: We Do Math (All the Time)
I will never choose a job where I’m going to have to do math. In 8th grade, that was a pretty non-negotiable part of my future. And look at me now, crunching mortgage numbers behind a desk for The Espinal Adler Team. That old/young me with a mullet would...