2024 started with a busy tone for the New York City real estate market. For all of 2023, we said to our buyers that “you marry the price but not the rate”, meaning now was a good time to buy because it’s a buyer’s market and prices were negotiable. You could always refinance when mortgage rates came down. A small fraction of our buyer clients were cautious believers of this theory. In January, some of these buyers started to look, as the market’s conviction of soft landing and rate cuts grew. Our team had to take off a number of listings last year because the sellers couldn’t get the prices they wanted. In the last few weeks, we got unsolicited enquiries from buyers’ brokers about whether these sellers would still consider selling. However, most buyers were only driven by the actual rates, instead of the expectation of lower rates. So even though more buyers were out looking, it hadn’t translated to any noticeable price movements.

New year also brought new requirements for the sellers. If you are looking to sell a 1-4 family house, you are now required to disclose certain conditions of the house, whereas before sellers could give buyers a $500 credit if they didn’t want to disclose.

Talking about changes, we also have had a number of sellers asking about the potential changes in the commission structure. The fact that the seller pays for both the seller’s and the buyer’s broker commissions was always just a market convention. Sellers were never legally required to do so. Now all the lawsuits have brought new awareness to the market, that the sellers can choose whether or not they would like to offer to pay for the buyer’s broker commissions. So far in Manhattan, we have only seen one listing that said buyers needed to make any buyer’s broker fees part of the offer, meaning it was not automatically included. For a detailed discussion of the pros and cons of different options, please reach out to me.