Halstead Property sees gold in emerging neighborhoods

As the Manhattan market tightens with low-apartment inventory and prices affordable only to the ultrarich, the outer boroughs have become a home-buying battleground for folks making "normal" livings. Noticing emerging neighborhoods outside of Manhattan has become a key strategy for big Manhattan-based brokerage houses intent on servicing New York homebuyers.

Halstead Property has become a leader in expanding its presence to strong borough markets. In 2001, it opened its first Brooklyn office after purchasing a local boutique agency. In September, it bought another local company, further becoming part of the community and allowing the organization a chance to deliver big-company service with local flavor.

Halstead used a different strategy in 2005, opening a 20-plus agent office in Riverdale, the safe-and-bucolic northwest Bronx neighborhood emerging as one of the best non-Manhattan home-buying opportunities in the low- and high-end of the market.

Homes in the area range from $165,000 for a one-bedroom co-op to $5 million-plus Tudor mansions overlooking the Hudson River. Halstead is the first of the big three New York real-estate companies (Corcoran and Prudential Douglas Elliman are the other two) to open an office in the Bronx.

"We were here before Starbucks," says Vasco Da Silva, the Halstead broker who opened and manages the Riverdale office. "I moved here from Brooklyn in 2003 and quickly noticed the neighborhood's potential. It wasn't being serviced by any large agency with serious marketing capabilities. This will be the next hip-and-affordable spot to live."

Based in the company's upper West Side office at the time, Da Silva shot an e-mail to Diane M. Ramirez, president of Halstead since 1987. Two years later, Halstead had a storefront office on Johnson Ave., Riverdale's main drag.

"When you think of New York, you cannot have blinders on that make you think of only Manhattan," says Ramirez. "We saw a great number of our customers moving to Brooklyn in 1999 and recently to Riverdale. Instead of sending customers to other brokers, we reshaped our strategy to become part of those local markets where we saw our customers wanting to live."

Riverdale has taken off. In 2001, a large one-bedroom in a co-op cost $95,000. Now it's almost $200,000. Prices of stand-alone houses have increased 20% in the past two years. Seven months ago, Starbucks opened its first store in the neighborhood.

Newly built condominiums sprouted up throughout the area. At the Riverstone, a new condo with luxury amenities being marketed by Halstead's development group, a three-bedroom 1,896-square-foot apartment is on the market for $1.175 million. On the upper West Side, a 12-minute drive from Riverdale, the same unit would go for more than $2 million.