Harlem real estate

The heart of Harlem is being reshaped - some say gutted - in a blitz of big-money real-estate deals, starting with nearly a dozen small shops getting squeezed out to make way for retail and office development. "Harlem will be gone," lamented Lanise Benjamin, whose 90-year-old grandfather's legendary music shop, Bobby's Happy House, is being evicted from Frederick Douglass Boulevard. "To tear this building down would essentially be to tear Harlem apart."

Vision Group developing Brooklyn condo project

Vision Real Estate Group, owned by Amir Yerushalmi, is developing the Greenpoint Lofts business condominium project in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, for $22 million. The project has 68 offices. Soaring rents in New York, where 95% of offices are rented, has resulted in a new trend of business condominiums, or commercial condominiums, in which offices can be purchased, rather than leased. A business condominium can be purchased for half the price of an apartment condominium, and real estate experts predict that the business condominium will become an increasingly important niche market in the coming years.

Fast forward to today's real estate market

"The New York real estate market started to experience problems in the late 1980s that extended into the early 1990s," he explains. "With the exuberance the real estate markets have experienced in the past few years, people tend to forget that real estate prices actually declined in value in the early '90s. I remember units in my Upper West Side co-op building declining by about 30 to 40 percent from mid '80s peak to the early '90s trough. There was a confluence of factors that caused this depressed real estate market, including tax reforms that reversed tax policies favorable to real estate assets, oversupply that resulted from overbuilding fueled by easy money, an unprecedented wave of co-op conversions, and what eventually turned to a liquidity crisis."

Donald Trump : New York Real Estate May Be Vulnerable

New York City's real estate market is still booming -- but "that may change at a moment's notice," said Donald Trump in an interview with CNBC. The billionaire developer told CNBC's Erin Burnett that despite the weakening housing market across the U.S., "certain small luxury niches" remain strong, including Manhattan and Palm Beach, Fla. The Gotham market "is stronger than I've ever seen it," Trump said, adding, "but next week, I may have an entirely different story."