WHETHER it’s the best of times, or times are just O.K., could depend on whom you ask.
Some analysts see the recent trend of buying homes from floor plans as a sign that the market is fully back. Case in point: the mad dash for units at One57, the new Midtown condominium that is still an active construction site.
Others see a different reality, in which buyers are still skittish, and they cite the mixed bag of statistics from third-quarter sales — some activity up, some prices down — to prove their point.
But some developers have a plan to get those reluctant buyers off the fence. They’re dangling incentives, or discounts paid by the developer at closing, to seal the deal on apartments.
“They can get buyers across the finish line,” said Eric Benaim, the chief executive of Modern Spaces, a brokerage.
To be fair, Manhattan’s trendiest new condos aren’t bending over backward to get buyers in the door.But some condos that tailor to middle-income buyers or are in still-gentrifying neighborhoods have again embraced the idea that every little enticement helps, especially with hard-to-unload remaining units.
Mr. Benaim is relying on incentives to help wrap up a pair of projects in Long Island City, Queens.
At L Haus, at 11-02 49th Avenue, buyers receive a credit equal to 6 percent of the unit’s cost when completing a purchase, though it can be applied only to closing expenses. Under different circumstances the credit might have been just 5 percent, Mr. Benaim said, but the Stahl Organization, the developer, raised the amount to cover the state’s so-called mansion tax, which is a 1 percent charge on any sale for $1 million and up.
Modern Spaces, which took over sales in January after replacing Douglas Elliman, started the incentive program in August. At the time, 20 of 123 units remained; since then 19 have sold.
Brokers temporarily suspended the program in September and October, which are normally strong sales months, but Mr. Benaim said buyers of six units told him that the incentives were the reason they took the plunge.
The incentive program at the Murano, at 519 Borden Avenue, takes a looser approach. At closing, buyers receive a 5 percent check from the development team, Hudson Equities and Jim Plotkin, and it has no strings attached. In other words, the money doesn’t have to be spent on closing costs.
“You can use it to buy a car if you want to,” said Mr. Benaim, who added that the credit applied only to two-bedrooms, since they are harder to sell in that market than one-bedrooms. The two-bedrooms cost $670,00 to $970,000.
The incentive program, which began in October, hasn’t found any takers, but Hurricane Sandy deterred buyers last month, he added. The Murano, which opened in 2010, has 11 of its 76 units left.
Similarly, incentives help sell units that are on top floors, which are usually the most expensive, or on the bottom floors, which can lack light and views, said Richard Steinberg, a broker with Warburg Realty who handled sales at Twenty9th Park Madison. At 39 East 29th Street, the condomimium, developed by the Spanish company Espais Promociones Immobiliárias, started sales in 2007 but struggled to move its 144 units during the recession and its aftermath, Mr. Steinberg said.
In June, Espais began offering to pay for transfer taxes and lawyer fees. The result was a speedy eight sales in six months, to wrap up the project.
Brian Meier, a Douglas Elliman broker, has a bigger hill to climb with MeadowWood at Gateway in East New York, Brooklyn, but incentives are helping. For years, Fillmore Real Estate was in charge of sales at the 19-tower, 1,152-unit condo near the Belt Parkway, which Taconic Investment Partners converted from a 1960s rental complex. Over that period, Fillmore sold an average of seven units a month, for a total of about 500 units, Mr. Meier said. Apartments at MeadowWood, which have granite counters and bamboo floors, start at around $120,000.
But since September, when Douglas Elliman came aboard, the sales rate has shot up to 16 a month, an increase that Mr. Meier attributed to incentives.
Though Fillmore had offered seller’s concessions of up to 6 percent of the sale price to be spent on closing costs, Douglas Elliman came up with new ways of allocating the money. Among them are programs that cover common charges in advance as well as a “1-1-1 buydown,” which pays the equivalent of one point of a buyer’s mortgage interest rate for the first three years. On a typical three-bedroom at MeadowWood, that can translate into more than $10,000 in savings, Mr. Meier said.
Incentives may take money out of developers’ pockets, he said, but “you would spend the money on advertising anyway.”
