NYC Apartment Agent

Hot Condos: Gone In One Hour (Photo by Bruno J. Navarro)

NEW YORK — Condo sales are heating up across the metropolitan area, so much so that pausing for lunch might mean missing out on a dream home.

A couple who mulled two condominium apartments for sale in a Hoboken, N.J., development while grabbing a bite to eat returned an hour later to find both of their options already in contract.

“People feel like now is the time to buy and they aren’t isolated to one building in Hoboken,” Toll Brothers CEO Douglas Yearley said in a May 23 conference call with analysts. “Confidence is up. The interest rates are there and they’ve been waiting so long to move on with their lives that they came out this spring.”

The Pennsylvania-based luxury homebuilder a 47 percent increase in quarterly orders for new homes. (Sales of existing homes recently neared a 2-year high, as well.)

The story, reported by Bloomberg Businessweek and other news organizations, stands out because it reflects the turnaround made in the New York real estate market.

While Hoboken is still on the other side of the Hudson River, as far as I know, it resembles what has been happening in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens over the past couple of months with increasing regularity.

And it isn’t idle talk.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports: “In Hoboken, Toll Brothers increased prices six times since it began selling apartments last spring in the 157-unit 1450 Washington at Hudson Tea, where prices now range from $450,000 to $1 million, said Todd Dumaresq, marketing manager for Toll’s City Living division. The company has sold 108 units in the building and is now selling about 12 homes a month, he said.”

Toll Brothers offers such developments as The Touraine in Manhattan, 2 Northside Piers in Williamsburg and 205 Water Street in DUMBO, as well as three condo buildings in Hoboken. (Anecdotally, buyers I’ve worked with have been interested in a couple of these condos, only to find that they were sold before we’d had a chance to view them — one reason to pursue apartments aggressively.)

For those paying attention, the signs are adding up.

Recently, Time magazine took note of another feature of a strong sales market: Bidding wars.

As always, if you’re looking to buy, sell or rent a home in New York, please let me know.