COVID-19 & New York Real Estate Market update 1

The world has been changed completely in the past month or so, from the assumption of a serious flu to a worldwide pandemic, who knew? What is really happening? How is the Real Estate market affected? No one has the definite answer, we can only make educated guesses and assumptions. From this week, we will start posting weekly blog on the things we learned this week, due to the nature of this business, there will be no reliable data until probably 2-3 months down the road, we can only describe what the community is experiencing and things evolve every minute...

The overall sense is that we don't know what will happen next, there will be 2 approaches to this: Optimistic or Pessimistic. We are in Real Estate, so being cautiously optimistic is the best approach. Things did not get out of hand when April 5th passed, which means most of the owners received their rent payments and most of the tenants paid on time, things got worse in mid-march, like everything else, there is a lag, most of the tenants have ACH set up, so they had enough money in the bank for the payment, we are only one month into this, we have already been getting emails from our tenants asking for reductions (although they are not affected financially), I suspect that things will deteriorate if the economy is not back on track within 3 months.