EVERY house hunter has his or her own system. Most of them, though, aren’t about to be patented.
Neil Binder expects that his system is.
The co-founder and co-owner of New York’s Bellmarc real-estate brokerage, Binder has been working for 15 years on a computerized search system designed to pluck a buyer’s perfect pad from Manhattan’s entire apartment inventory.
After more than a decade of refinement, the system, called Selection Portfolio, is at last complete and being rolled out for use across the company.
Essentially, Binder and Bellmarc have created a database wherein various attributes (quality of neighborhood, quality of building and quality of view, for example) of apartments for sale in Manhattan are ranked on a scale of 1 to 10. (Although Binder says he would eventually like to expand this database to the outer boroughs, there are no imminent plans for that.) Buyers then input their minimum requirements for each attribute, along with their square-footage requirements and price range, and the program sorts through Manhattan’s real-estate inventory – balancing the buyer’s preferences and looking for appropriate matches.
It’s a labor-intensive process (Bellmarc has a team of employees devoted to assigning grades to all of the borough’s neighborhoods and buildings), but, Binder says, it allows his agents to show potential buyers more properties all across the city, including those represented by other firms.
“At other firms, salespeople tend to become building specialists,” he says. “The broker mostly takes people around to the apartments they know and hopes that they say nice things.”
Meanwhile, apartments outside the salesperson’s area of familiarity are less likely to be shown.
Similarly, buyers also come to the table wanting to look only in a few predetermined neighborhoods, not realizing that there are other areas out there they might find perfectly amenable.
“We constantly have people who come in saying, ‘I want to live in neighborhood X,’ who end up in neighborhood Y,” Binder says. “The customer comes in with deficient levels of information. This lets them explore all the options.”
So how exactly does it work?
Let’s say you’re a trust-fund hipster with about a half-million bucks to drop on a pad. You’re probably looking on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood that, in Bellmarc’s rankings, rates around a 4 (a 10, by way of comparison, would be Central Park West). That’s the number you’ll plug in for your minimum neighborhood requirement.
As for the building itself, you should at least look like you’re slumming it (for the sake of your indie cred, if nothing else), so you won’t want anything too fancy. A standard doorman building is a 5, so we’ll mark the minimum building requirement a 4. And standard streetscape views sound just about right. That rates a 5, so we’ll make that the minimum requirement for the category.
Add in your square-footage needs and price range, click search and see what comes up. If the system works, you should find a number of downtown abodes (hello, Rivington Street!) but also a few possibilities in ‘hoods you may not have considered (Washington Heights, anyone?).
At least, that’s how it goes in theory. How about in practice?
Pretty much as billed. A search on behalf of an imaginary young financier with a million to blow on a one-bedroom yielded apartment in far-downtown buildings like 20 Pine, 75 Wall St. and 20 West St. – just the sorts of places a budding Master of the Universe might look. It turned up a number of spots uptown, too – among them an 1,100-square-foot one-bedroom with 121/2-foot ceilings and greenhouse windows on 46th between First and Second avenues. Granted, that probably wouldn’t be his first choice of neighborhood, but given all that space, it might be worth a look.
Running the search for an imaginary family of four with a budget of $2.5 million turned up a similar citywide range. One of the more promising was a three- bedroom co-op at 173 Riverside Dr. in a building with a playroom, game room and gym. Downtown, the system offered up a three-bedroom duplex in Battery Park City with views of the Hudson.
And on the Upper East Side, it found a 26th-floor three-bedroom with 11-foot ceilings and marble baths in a building with a playroom, gym and private roof garden.
Now, could buyers go out and find all these listings themselves? Maybe. Could they do it as quickly and easily as Binder did with Selection Portfolio? Probably not. Manhattan is a big place, and these days, Binder notes, there are quality apartments almost everywhere. So it never hurts to have a system on your side.