How Is New York Doing? COVID-19 and The Real Estate Industry

COVID-19 has upended all our lives. And even as we enter a recovery period, rules change on a near weekly or monthly basis. While it seems like we made it through to the other side of the tunnel, we have to take a moment and cast a outward gaze towards large population centers. Places like New York City have been a hot spot for COVID and it it should not come as the biggest surprise. For example, New York has over 132 million passengers passing in and out of its airports each year. This averages to 11 million passengers per month. It is good news that more damage was not done.  

But with that said, what's going on with the city as we close out 2022?

How's The City?

To find out how the city is doing we have to look at a few elements. For example unemployment and subway usage. Without going to deep into it, we are not subway experts, we just want to know a bit of what's going on to stay informed. Check out The City.com for  great in-depth dives into everything NYC and their restoration.  

Massive Job Loss: It is reported that the city lost one million jobs back in the first week of 2020. That is a staggering number. And even for a state that could take time to recover. This is from the shutdown of all but essential work to minimize the risk of more contamination. And since the unemployment rate has been stuck far under the national level.  

Travel Shut Down: If you have been to the city before you know how important travel is. As people say NYC is a city that never sleeps and never stops moving. So when subway ridership dropped down to single digits. It became a wild ghost town. And even at the end of 2022 the numbers hover just over 10 million down from 26.5 million at the start of 2020.

Migrations Back To Offices: New York City is also a hub for business. Many massive companies have some sort of presence in the city. When the world was thrown into remote work, some businesses survived, many did not. Now, as many attempt to return to these offices, systems that have grown dusty during shutdown have to snap back to life.  We talked about remote work more in our blog on 2022 trends as well as in our blog about how covid effected the market. Make sure to check those out if you want even more info on one of the more important changed COVID made to our lives.

Some Tips To Keep Weathering The Storm

While COVID has been mostly dealt with in the short term, it is not gone. Here are some of the original tips we presented in this blog when it first came out back when things where bad that still hold value. Even more so if you are a agent trying to keep working during this rough time.

Have a Clear Protocol for COVID-19.

• Your office should have a clear plan of what they are doing internally and externally given COVID-19. Look to the NAR Sample Preparedness Plan for more specific ideas. At this point, a specific plan needs to be formulated and communicated regardless of your geographical location.

Contact Your Clients (Current and Past)

• Make sure your current clients know what precautions you are taking to ensure safety. Are you giving virtual tours first instead of in-person tours of homes? Are you making sure all buyers are wearing booties? What are you doing to make that client feel as though you are protecting his or her best interest?
• Let your past clients know what information is coming from the state that may pertain to them given the local or federal government’s response to the pandemic. (Did your city freeze rent? Stop eviction proceedings? Stop realtors from showing apartments or homes?)

Build Up Connections

• Be sure to build connections through NuOp during this time. The impact of the virus will cause tremendous shifts to occur in a few months. If you are socially-isolating or self-quarantining, be sure to stay connected and build connections for future business. Additionally, spruce up your LinkedIn Page and tidy up your Facebook account, as well. Most will be using social media even more during these times.

Conclusion

We should all breath a collective sigh of relive as we sit here today. We made it through something horrible and things seem to be, somewhat, recovering. And even know business is rough there are tools out there for you agents and other referral based workers to keep steady during this recovery. One of which is NuOp and is your best bet to keeping your referral business going.

You can sign up for free today and get access to a bunch of tools to help you stay in business.