Flight to Quality

Flight to Quality

At a dinner party the other night with a Manhattan real estate agent and a couple from New Jersey the conversation shifted suddenly from spouses dying of aneurysms to the local residential property markets. In the city, top-end brokers find themselves in a back-to-the-future circa 2006 frenzy—it’s a seller’s market and bidding wars ramp up prices with all or mostly cash buyers having a major edge. Developers of skyscraper condos nearing completion have timed the market extremely well, attracting nervous offshore money looking for a safe haven. Chinese and Russian mogul types, who aren’t really supposed to bank cash outside their borders, park major sums in sumptuous view space, while lesser but still well-heeled BRIC capitalists follow into the market acquiring lower but still high-price point digs.