Halstead Property

Fritz Frigan
Executive Director of Sales / Leasing, Eastside
ffrigan@halstead.com
(212) 317-7804

Carla Deleon
Eastside Office
Tel: (212) 317-7851
cdeleon@halstead.com

David Hench
Vice President
Eastside Office
Tel: (212) 317-7831
dhench@halstead.com

For Now It's All Yours

By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS

LESLEY REY was carrying two mortgages when her income from selling airplanes took a dive last fall. She has a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side and a house in Westchester.

“You feel a little defeated by the economy,” she said. “But you have to make sacrifices.”

She couldn’t sell the house in Westchester because she owns it with her sister, and she couldn’t bear to part with her home on the Upper West Side.

“It’s just too perfect,” she said.

At the suggestion of the real estate broker who sold her the apartment, Carol Halt, who now works at Barak Realty, she decided to rent it out. And she decided to leave it furnished.

In this economy, many an apartment has become unaffordable as jobs disappear and income shrinks. But if your home is a place you love too much to sell, the best way to hang on to it may be to entrust it to somebody else for a while.

Leaving the furniture behind can be a good way to make it through tough financial times — the owner doesn’t have to spend money on storage and the tenant does not have to pay for furniture.

According to Halstead Property, the number of furnished apartments in its database — which includes rentals by co-op and condo owners, as well as sublets by other renters — jumped by more than 50 percent from the first six months of 2008 to the same period this year.

“Certainly, part of that increase is due to inventory that was on the market for sale that shifted to the rental market,” said Fritz Frigan, the executive director of sales and leasing at Halstead.

There’s nothing like an economic landslide to help a person move past the disquieting idea of sharing personal belongings with a stranger.

Ms. Rey remembers the January evening when her tenant arrived as an unnerving experience.

“This is really weird!” she recalled saying to the man, whom she had found on Craigslist. “I don’t even know you, and I’m leaving my apartment in your hands.”

The apartment, yes. And also the books, the candles, the rugs, even the standing mixer in the kitchen. “All of that stayed,” she said. “I just took down my photos.”

The arrangement, for $3,000 a month, went well, though Ms. Rey found the month-to-month renewal process frustrating. When her first tenant cleared out in May, friends of her brother signed a one-month lease, and she started looking for her next tenant. She returned to Craigslist for a replacement. This time, her luck was not so good.

She rented the place to a dancer who agreed to stay for the summer. But at the beginning of August, the young woman moved out without paying for most of July. She still owes Ms. Rey $2,000.

So Ms. Rey, who now sells golf memberships at a country club, is again in the market for a tenant. In light of falling rents, she is asking $2,600 for her apartment, $400 less than she received in the winter.

She has turned the transaction over to a broker, Carla Deleon at Halstead, who she hopes will protect her from another deadbeat tenant. In exchange for the broker fee, Ms. Deleon will take care of credit checks and employment verification, as well as oversee the application to the condominium board for permission to rent.

Ms. Rey says she skipped that step previously because she was in financial straits and needed to find a way to make ends meet quickly.

Ms. Deleon, who handles both sales and rentals at Halstead, does not work on many furnished rentals. “They’re really hard to rent,” she said. “People have their tastes, and they want to feel at home when they walk in. Sometimes they say no because they don’t like the furniture.”

Gary Malin, the president of the Citi Habitats, a New York brokerage, says few brokers spend much time on sublets, furnished or otherwise. Many of those transactions are conducted online on sites like Craigslist and sublet.com.

“It’s not as lucrative,” he said. “A lot of owners don’t price their apartments appropriately, and some want to do things outside of their board’s approval.”

Owners of both condos and co-ops must get board approval to rent their apartments; policies vary from building to building.

Randi Miller has no intention of selling the co-op apartment on the Upper East Side where she has lived for seven years. “I saw the view and I said, ‘This is my apartment,’ ” she recalled. “And I’ve lived here happily ever since.”

But Ms. Miller, a lawyer, lost her job last fall and has had a difficult time finding work.

“I was initially very depressed and stressed out,” she said. “Then I realized that it was an opportunity to take time to explore other things, and do things that I would never leave a permanent job to do.”

In the spring, she spent two months in Nepal, volunteering at the Nepal Orphans Home. She has since joined its board of advisers.

Now she plans to rent out her home in New York — fully furnished — for at least a year, so she can live and work abroad.

She has listed her one-bedroom with David Hench at Halstead for $2,600 a month. She says this figure is as low as she can go — it is already less money than she needs to break even after the mortgage and maintenance payments.

“I don’t want to rent it at any price,” she said. “I need to rent it at a price that’ll help me.”

But the rental market has softened considerably in the last year.

Farnoosh Torabi’s studio apartment on West 80th Street has been listed for rent since the first week of July, but she has yet to receive a nibble. Earlier this month, she decided that she would pay the broker fee herself.

“I feel like listing it as a no-fee is going to help it a lot,” she said. “Whoever is looking at a studio doesn’t have a huge budget.”

In addition to listing and showing the apartment, her broker will also guide potential renters through the condo board approval process.

Ms. Torabi, 29, is an author and a financial adviser on a reality television show, “The Bank of Mom and Dad,” which will have its debut this fall. She bought the condo apartment five years ago. She loves it, she says, and wants to keep it as a pied-à-terre — she anticipates a move to the suburbs when she’s ready to have a family.

But right now Ms. Torabi needs to make room for her boyfriend, who visits regularly from Philadelphia. So she has rented a one-bedroom apartment 10 blocks away and is offering the studio for $2,300 a month furnished, or $2,200 unfurnished.

“I hope it rents furnished,” she said. “I’m not looking forward to hiring movers to do something with this stuff or to having a fire sale. I also like the way I’ve decorated the place. If it ends up being a place that I keep for the long term, I wouldn’t want to change anything.”

Well, she may take the pictures off the walls.

“That’s my taste,” Ms. Torabi said. “I’m not going to insist that they stay. But I’m leaving my plates and my utensils, some of my stemware.”

Then she utters her version of the landlord’s prayer: “I take a lot of pride of ownership. I just hope that whoever lives here appreciates the last five years of thought and reconstruction that’s gone into this studio. I just hope they will be nice to my apartment.”

From a renter’s perspective, there is at least one advantage to renting a furnished apartment from an individual: the price. Privately owned apartments tend to be much less expensive than other options.

New York City has several extended-stay hotels that offer furnished apartments, the bulk of which are in Midtown. These often have full kitchens and hotel-style services like same-day laundry, and you can stay for a few nights or a few months. But a one-bedroom in one of these places runs about $6,000 per month, adjusted downward for longer stays. And for many subtenants, price is of paramount importance.

“The goal, of course, is to do it for free,” said Tony Stubblebine, 31, who has in the past swapped his California home for an apartment on the Upper West Side.

This summer he and his girlfriend, Sarah Milstein, 40, sublet in New York — two months at an apartment in the West Village and two weeks in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. During that time, they sublet their Bay Area home to offset costs.

Both of the places rented by Ms. Milstein and Mr. Stubblebine were furnished, and sublet from other renters. Neither minded if Eggs, their dog, came, too.

Mr. Stubblebine said the potential awkwardness of being surrounded by another person’s belongings was mitigated by their busy social and professional lives.

“Except for the time when we’re on our laptops, we’re mostly out of the house,” said Mr. Stubblebine, who runs a social networking software company. Ms. Milstein is a journalist, consultant and graduate student.

“At home in California,” he said, “we like to cook, so the kitchen is very organized according to our methods. At the places we’ve stayed here, it’d be almost impossible to cook. But it’s not really a problem; we tend to eat out.”

The couple came across both of their New York sublets on Craigslist. One thing they found challenging was that most ads were posted very close to the move-in date.

“I’m a planner,” Ms. Milstein said. “I would like to have everything booked a month or two months ahead.”

Before they committed to the West Village sublet, Ms. Milstein and Mr. Stubblebine had a friend in New York check it out.

Others, by necessity or by choice, take care of the whole process online.

Kati Gafney, 25, is subletting her one-bedroom rental apartment in Washington Heights for around $1,000 a month while she is in Nicaragua for three months this fall.

She and her subtenant, a graduate student from Toronto, will not meet before he moves in. They found one another on Craigslist, vetted each other on Facebook, and e-mailed back and forth a sublet agreement that Ms. Gafney found online. Ms. Gafney’s dog, Tiger, will be staying with a neighbor, but the student agreed, sight unseen, to feed her gecko, Mr. Fox, a meal of crickets every two weeks.

Landlord and tenant may end up as roommates for two or three weeks when Ms. Gafney returns, one person in the living room, the other in the bedroom.

Ms. Gafney isn’t worried about sharing her apartment with a stranger — the arrangement was her idea. But just in case, she amended the sublet agreement to say that she can evict him with 72 hours’ notice after Dec. 1.

In the meantime, Ms. Gafney’s requests are simple: Don’t burn the place down, pay the rent and don’t break the washing machine.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Friday, August 28, 2009