It’d come with the apartment like heat and hot water.

For New York City residents, the internet could come at no extra cost with apartments like heat and hot water if the city council passes a new bill.

Councilman Ben Kallos (who represents the Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island) introduced the bill on Thursday, October 7, proposing that all new construction in New York City would have to be wired for internet, with all existing housing (with 10 or more units) providing broadband Internet to tenants for free within three years.

The bill proposes that landlords would provide internet directly to every unit through ethernet and could purchase a bulk rate service contract with an internet service provider such as Spectrum, Altice, Verizon, or RCN, which would provide landlords with more than a 50% discount on retail fees, bringing costs down to as little as $14.95 a month per unit for at least 25 megabits per second for downloads and 3 megabits per second for uploads. Landlords would not be able to pass on this cost to tenants, but tenants would be able to pay for additional speed at no cost to the landlord.

A fund to assist existing building owners with demonstrated financial need would be created and administered by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) under the new law.

Kallos says the internet should be treated like any other utility because, without it, there’s a digital divide.

About 500,000 New Yorkers still have no internet in their homes, with the majority in Borough Park in Brooklyn and East Harlem. Here, only one-third of households in Borough Park and one-quarter of East Harlem households have no Internet.

Not only does lack of internet make it more difficult for students and workers to succeed in this digital age, but it even affects vaccination rates. A recent study published by the Centers for Disease Control found that “COVID-19 vaccination was significantly associated with household internet access in New York City at the zip code level,” Kallos says.

“Every New York City apartment comes with heat, hot water, electricity, and a phone line. It’s time to add internet, so it is there and just works when a tenant moves in,” he said in a statement. “We can finally end the digital divide and bridge the homework gap by making sure every apartment in New York City comes with internet. You can’t get a vaccine if you can’t get online to schedule or even find an appointment, this pandemic has shown that the internet is now a necessity.”

To that end, NYC already announced that all new subsidized affordable housing will be required to include internet access at no cost to the tenant according to new design guidelines released in March.

And Kallos has already worked with Attorney General Tish James to advocate for low-cost high-speed Internet for low-income New Yorkers and got Internet Assist at $14.95 for students on free and reduced lunch and seniors receiving supplemental Social Security Income.

The new bill would take this even further.

“NYC has historically led the way in deploying the most current and robust communications technologies for our individual and collective social and economic progress. From the telegraph to the telephone, to broadband, NYC has been the nation, the world’s pioneer,” said Professor Jonathan Askin, the founder and director of the Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy Clinic at Brooklyn Law School. “Council Member Kallos’ proposed legislation would ensure that all New Yorkers, individually and collectively, may take fullest advantage of the broadband internet, including maximum access to the universe of online knowledge and the collaborative capabilities of online networks. In this circumstance, NYC is blessed by its density and existing infrastructure, allowing relatively easy and economic deployment of robust broadband internet to all our residents.”

Origination: https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/every-apartment-in-nyc-could-get-free-internet-thanks-to-this-new-bill-101321 

Wall Street has made a mountain of money available to house flippers, and selling move-in-ready rehabs has rarely been easier. The challenge is finding beat-up and out-of-date properties that can be renovated and resold for a profit.

“Investors like me, we’re like ants on a sugar hill all fighting for the same projects,” said Ed Stock, who started fixing and flipping houses on New York’s Long Island after the 2008 mortgage meltdown. “It’s the greatest time to be in this market; it’s just hard to find the inventory.”

Foreclosure moratoriums have shut off a big source of fixer-uppers since last spring’s lockdown. Meanwhile, competition is stiff from regular home buyers armed with superlow mortgage rates and inspired by cable-TV renovators. Rising costs and limited availability of labor and building materials, such as lumber, cut into profits and stretch out jobs

Just 2.7% of home sales were flips—sales within a year of a prior sale—during the first quarter, according to property data firm Attom. That is the lowest portion of sales since at least 2000, when Attom started counting flips. The number of flipped houses and condos were the fewest in a quarter since 2003.

That was two housing booms back and long before measured-in-months loans to house flippers became some of the hottest properties on Wall Street. Mortgage trusts, pensions, hedge funds, private-equity firms, investment banks and insurance companies all want so-called flip loans, drawn by yields in the range of 8% to 12% at a time when one-year Treasurys pay less than 0.1%.

Mr. Stock’s lender, Roc360, last week received a $2 billion infusion from insurer Athene Holding Ltd. to make more loans to house flippers as well as landlords, who buy a lot of rehabbed houses. Arvind Raghunathan, Roc360’s chief executive, said his firm would have little trouble raising several billion more given the hunt for yield that has sent investors into less-familiar pockets of fixed income.

“These notes have done extraordinarily well the last eight years,” Mr. Raghunathan said. “There have been hardly any losses, and 8% for one-year paper is extraordinary.”

Many flip loans are repaid even sooner, allowing investors to recycle their capital by lending anew or buying additional loans to boost returns.

New York Mortgage Trust Inc. said it ramped up its investment in flip loans last fall and ended June with $622 million worth, carrying an average coupon of 9.33%. The firm bundled $167 million worth of loans into two-year securities, sold them to other investors and expects that replacing repaid loans with new notes before the securities mature will produce returns in the high teens or low 20s.

“There’s not many markets where you could achieve that type of return,” the firm’s president, Jason Serrano, told investors last month.

Toorak Capital Partners, which has been buying flip loans and pooling them into securities since 2018, in June sold a $339.5 million security, its first deal since before the pandemic. To supplement the scarcer house flips, CEO John Beacham said Toorak has been buying loans that fund renovations of small apartment buildings. There is much less competition for these than houses. Additionally, the firm is bundling longer-term notes to rental-house investors, who have accounted for more than 1 in 5 home sales in some of the country’s hottest markets.

“We’ve seen a lot of competition come into the space,” Mr. Beacham said. “It’s hard for investors to find deals in a lot of places.”

On Long Island, Mr. Stock works his real-estate connections and estate-sale scouts to find deals before they hit the market. He looks for houses that need so much work that they won’t qualify for typical government-backed mortgages. Such homes have become hard to come by in the working-class neighborhoods where he used to do most of his flipping. So he has moved up market and into new areas, such as the Hamptons, where more people are living year-round, and even Florida.

Mr. Stock expects to do about 15 flips this year, well below the 53 he undertook in 2014 when foreclosures flooded the market. Most houses he buys are gutted to the studs, windows and roofs replaced, plumbing and electrical systems brought to code, mold remediated. Walls are knocked down and floor plans opened. Marble countertops, stainless steel appliances, and other modern trappings are installed.

Roc360 finds flippers such as Mr. Stock with a team of data scientists who sift through public property records for houses that have been bought and quickly resold for gains. Once the people behind profitable flips are pinpointed, Roc360 targets them with advertisements and on social media, offering cheaper financing and deals on property and casualty insurance, appraisals and at home-improvement retailers.

“These are highly entrepreneurial crews,” Mr. Raghunathan said. “People who have really learned to keep their costs down and keep churning.”

Mr. Raghunathan, who has a doctorate in computer science, and others started the firm in 2013. It seeks to adapt the sort of technology his team at quantitative-trading hedge fund Roc Capital Management used to pick stocks and bonds to find the best borrowers in the realms of flip and rental houses.

Origination: https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/wall-street-cant-get-enough-fixer-upper-houses/