NYC Apartment Buyers, Set Your Alarms: June 30, 2009!

In recent months, even the most unflaggingly optimistic New York City real estate insiders have been finding it increasingly difficult to pass off the NYC real estate market’s symptoms of the property value pox devaluing the rest of the nation as an empathy pimple.

As in medieval times, when hair-shirted Europeans flogged themselves to appease angry gods and hasten an end to the Black Death, many nervous NYC apartment buyers and sellers are ready to entertain supernaturally divined reassurance that there is meaning in their acid reflux and that their vexation is finite.

Enter James Cramer, New York Magazine’s “resident financial expert”, wearing a comically over-sized turban that even Johnny Carson would consider ethnically insensitive when Mr. Cramer then clutches at his crystal balls and boldly asserts, “I got your prediction—right here!—June 30th, 2009, total NYC real estate market turn around!”

OK, maybe he didn't announce it quite like that, my imagination has an overactive costume department. But to those who have come to see the NYC real estate market’s empathy pimples as a pox of biblical proportions, Mr. Cramer’s claim to know the precise date on which NYC property values will reverse their downward slide may seem no less wacky. In his actual words, Mr. Cramer states:

“The converted bears, as well as the panicked sellers desperate to bail out and nervous buyers afraid to jump in, will be dead wrong nine months from now, when housing prices bottom. In fact, I’ll call the precise date of the housing-market turnaround. It will begin on June 30, 2009.”

So according to Mr. Cramer, if you purchase your NYC apartment on June 30, 2009, you will potentially see the greatest possible return on your investment since NYC real estate values tanked in 1989-1991.

Mr. Cramer offers 10 very compelling—and not at all wacky—reasons he believes you should be on the phone with your favorite real estate broker no later than June 29, 2009. Here are his top three reasons, nutshelled:

1) The rate of new come construction has slowed waaay down...

"By next June we won’t be building enough homes to accommodate demand, and the gap between supply and demand won’t be made up by unsold inventory."

2) Troubled homeowners will begin benefiting from federal bailouts...

"By nine months from now, the FHA will have taken millions in terrible floating-rate loans with high interest rates and turned them into 30-year mortgages with much lower rates. That’s going to reduce the number of foreclosed homes, and the supply of available homes, dramatically."

3) Bargains! Sweet, sweet, cut-rate, dirt-cheap, fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck NYC apartments!

"[B]y June of next year, I believe real-estate prices will have fallen 25 percent nationwide from their previous highs, with some of the hardest-hit areas of the country down as much as 50 percent. At those price levels, homes will seem irresistible to the many millions of potential buyers who have stayed on the sidelines."