Business

A bidders market

What housing crisis?

Despite the nationwide malaise in the real-estate market, here in the city good old-fashioned bidding wars have broken out again over select properties.

The local housing market has plenty of tail wind to help it along: the feds’ home-buyer tax credit allowed plenty of first-time buyers to fight for lower-end homes, historically low mortgage rates, thanks to skittish investors worrying about Europe and the stock market, and sellers getting comfortable with lower asking prices.

Bidding wars on upscale homes are bucking the downward trend in average home sale prices, as wealthy buyers send prices surging in some fashionable New York-area neighborhoods.

Even as home prices year-over-year in the New York metropolitan market dipped 2.4 percent in March, according to the closely watched S&P/Case-Shiller Index — and prices nationwide in the first quarter were down 3.2 percent compared with the previous quarter — some buyers are blissfully bidding up.

“We had big celebrations and made lots of plans for visiting our beautiful new home every two months,” said Caroline Levi, a mother of four who has a family home in Belgium and is married to an investment banker, after she snapped up a trophy downtown property.

Levi, after losing out in a West Village bidding war at 11 Barrow Street, just recently signed a contract on a stylish one-bedroom loft on Greene Street after her $1.9 million bid — $25,000 over asking price — trumped another bidder.

On the recommendation of her real estate agents, Levi swiftly jetted to New York to view apartment one week after it went on sale.

Levi’s is not the only case of a buyer paying over the asking price. Several real-estate professionals told the Post of white-hot demand as multiple buyers bid on high-end homes, sending prices through the roof.

In the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, Jessica Bachman, a broker at The Corcoran Group, said she has buyers “losing in bidding wars, left, right and center.” Bachman said of the 14 closings on residential properties she has transacted so far this year, five resulted in bidding wars.

For example, one townhouse on 14th Street, listed at $1.20 million, sold for $1.25 million. Even on the lower end, a 1.5 bedroom co-op on Eighth Avenue, with an asking price of $449,000, fetched $472,500. Last year, Bachman noted, there were no bidding wars in her neighborhood — and homes were typically selling at about 12 percent off the asking price.

Emmett Laffey, CEO of Greenvale, Long Island-based Century 21 Laffey Associates, says a combination of the federal home-buyer tax credit, which expired at the end of April and sellers bringing asking prices down 15 percent to 20 percent from last year, have juiced the local housing market. Those factors in turn drove some prices on the higher end right back up, according to Laffey.

Bachman at Corcoran agrees. “Prices have trended upwards,” she said. “We’ve been pricing things higher than last year and we’ve seen activity picking up.”

Laffey’s offices on Long Island and Queens sell homes that run the gamut from modest middle-class pads to multi-million-dollar mansions.

Of the 250 sales his brokers handled in April, several were over ask and 50 percent of them had multiple offers. “It’s been absolutely incredible,” Laffey said, recalling how his business tanked in the first quarter of 2009. When he was lucky enough to find buyers back then, prices were typically 10 percent or more off the asking price.

Steven Meyer, a real-estate broker in Bayside, was celebrating over a martini as he recalled how he recently listed a one-of-a-kind, two-family home with a deck in his neighborhood for $799,000, and then watched a bidding war take the price up to $815,000. The house sold within three days. Twelve months ago buyers were prowling for bargains and paying as much as 20 percent off the ask price, according to Meyer, president of Century 21 Bay Benjamin.

“There is very little fear in the market right now,” said Laffey.

Price wars again

Home sellers are seeing competitive bidding return to the process for selective neighborhoods.

95 Greene Street, SoHo

3 bedrooms

Listing Price: $1.9M

Selling Price: $1.925M

New York Jet Nick Mangold’s condo 130 Post Avenue, Westbury, L.I.

2 bedrooms

Listing Price: $495K

Selling Price: $500K

75 Prospect Park West, Park Slope

2 bedrooms

Listing Price: $1.095M

Selling Price: $1.55M