Buyers and sellers get on the same page

Editor's note: This article is reposted with permission of The Real Deal. Click here to view the original article.By CANDACE TAYLOR NEW YORK -- Zhann Jochinke, an associate broker at Argo Residential, put an alcove studio on the market last year for $525,000. But the offers that came in were as low as $390,000. "People were putting bids out there just to see if the person had to sell," he recalled. More recently, however, he convinced the seller to drop the price to around $490,000. Offers began coming in at "5 percent or less off the asking price," he said. Now, the listing is in contract, and expected to close in the next month. After months of uncertainty, Manhattan buyers and sellers are finally making a market. In the terrifying period after the Lehman Brothers crisis, so few properties were sold that pricing an apartment became a game of roulette. Buyers, too, were unsure what a property would trade for, and their offers wer...