Music Manager Paul Rosenberg Moving On

SELLER: Paul Rosenberg
LOCATION: Beach Street, New York, NY
PRICE: $4,950,000
SIZE: 4,634 square feet, 3 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: …a massive 4634 sf triplex with 785 sf of combined outdoor space, currently configured as three bedrooms (two en suite masters), 3.5 baths, plus a home office & dining area.Not only is this an elegant loft home, but a total environment as well which offers a patio with hot tub and outdoor Viking Professional grill with food and beverage center, a Crestron system which has integrated speakers and lighting control throughout every room and patio, home theatre room, glass enclosed wine and cigar bar, game room, and exercise room with sauna…

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Whenever we get a hankering for the hustle and bustle of New York City we poke around the internets to see who might be selling what. Our most recent spin through the always informative StreetEasy turned up a 3 bedroom and 3.5 bathroom TriBeCa triplex maisonette owned by music manager Paul Rosenberg and currently listed with an asking price of $4,950,000.

While Mister Rosenberg is hardly a household name, his number one client is. In addition to managing angry Academy Award winning white rapper Eminem, Mister Rosenberg has also had his voice sampled on most (if not all) of Mister Eminem’s albums and together the pair founded Shady Records, a label that also signed D12 (whoever that is) and the mega-rich money machine that is 50 Cent. Mister Rosenberg also manages The Knux and Three 6 Mafia (who won an academy award for their song It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp from the film Hustle and Flow) as well as co-manages the newly reformed pop-punk band Blink 182.

Property records and previous reports reveal that Mister Rosenberg scooped up the 4,634 square foot Beach Street maisonette, carved out of a former warehouse known as the Fischer Mills building, in August of 2002 for around $2,700,000. For all the non-New York puppies who don’t know because they probably don’t exist in places like Peoria, a maisonette is a multi-story house-like apartment, usually on the ground floor of a larger building, that possesses its own entrance from the outside. Maisonettes provide the privacy of a private home, but still have access to the amenities and security measures offered by the building.

According to listing information, the maisonette’s main floor, includes 14-16 foot ceilings, lots of exposed brick and the original, rough-hewn wood beams and column supports which are classic (if cliché) TriBeCa loft conversion aesthetic features. The living room measures nearly 600 square feet and includes loads of built in storage cabinets, a wet bar and an small section of thick glass flooring that looks down into and provides much needed light for what listing information calls a “wine and cigar bar” on the lower floor.

Also on the main level is a stone floored kitchen with maple cabinetry, black counter tops that appear to be stone rather than granite and a large work island with a quartet of bar stools similar to those that can be found in about a thousand cheap Chinese food restaurants below 23rd Street. The adjacent dining room has a soaring 16 foot ceiling, a set of French doors that open to a balcony overlooking the apartment’s private patio below, and an entire wall covered in varying shades of green color-blocks that we’d bet our long bodied bitches Linda and Beverly are leather panels affixed to the wall. Rather unfortunately, a powder pooper for guests opens directly into the dining room, which for obvious reasons is not optimal but could easily be relocated to a slightly better location on an adjacent wall.

One of the maisonette’s two master bedrooms completes the middle level and features two sets of French doors opening to the aforementioned balcony, a couple of not particularly commodious closets and a bathroom with a radiant heated stone floor. Hovering above the living space is a small loft office space and a second master bedroom with more generously sized closets than the master on the main floor and a large bathroom also, we presume, fitted with radiant heated floors, a feature Your Mama’s tootsies can not get enough of.

The lowest level of the triplex is where it becomes obvious that a man lives here. In addition to guest bedroom with direct access to the private patio, there is a home gym set-up with a dry sauna large enough to accommodate a few friends, a windowless recreation room with a round, poker game friendly table and chairs, an arcade game or two, a glassed enclosed wine and cigar bar and a media room with stone walls, caramel leather cover recliner like chairs.

A small and enviable private garden includes a built in grill area and a hot tub which sounds like a good idea except we’re more than a little concerned about all the windows that might look down into the patio which would make skinny dipping and hooking up with a hottie a bit more of a exhibitionist’s fantasy that Your Mama would feel comfortable.

According to listing information, Mister Rosenberg first put his three floor bachelor pad on the market in November of 2008 with an asking price of $5,450,000 and recently hacked five hundred grand off the price, a not so unusual maneuver in a somewhat stagnant Manhattan real estate market. None the less, Your Mama’s bejeweled abacus shows that even if Mister Rosenberg has to slice and dice the asking price even further, he could still easily pocket a million or more smackers on a sale which is, of course, nothing to sneeze at.

May 16th Conference Call and Webinar with Mike Morgan

I apologize to everyone expecting me to be posting more on this blog. I have been under the weather for the past couple of weeks, and now my Mom is in the hospital.

BUT . . .

Just in case I don’t get to post, I am holding an open conference call and webinar on May 16th. If you have questions about what is going on in and where we are going, please join us. I will be discussing the following:

1 - The Next Leg of the Housing Crisis . . . A Tsunami of Foreclosures

2 - Chrysler, General Motors, Ford, Toyota and Honda . . . Fiat too.

3 - Commercial Real Estate Collapse

4 - Pensions . . . and why you can’t depend on them.

5 - Municipal Bankruptcies

6 - Depression Level Unemployment

7 - How To Invest in Gold

8 - Stocks to Beat the Dow Jones

9 - Call in the Bottom in Housing

10 - Does Goldman Sachs and Wall Street Run the Government

11 - And I will take questions for as long as you can ask them. These conference calls generally last 4-6 hours, so you’re definitely going to get your money’s worth . . . and this one’s FREE.

Register in advance for dial in and access codes - Click Here

May 16th at 9:00PM Eastern . . . and if you can’t make it, you can listen to the entire call on a replay link. Just register for the call, and you will receive the replay link the following day.

Mid-Cycle Meltdown!: Jobless Claims April 30 2009

Today, the Department of Labor released their latest read of Joblessness showing seasonally adjusted "initial" unemployment claims declined 14,000 to 631,000 from last week's revised 645,000 claims while "continued" claims jumped 133,000 resulting in an "insured" unemployment rate of 4.7%.

It's important to note that the two most significant periods for job cuts on a non-seasonally adjusted basis is January 15 and July 15 so as July and clearer visibility on H2 quickly approaches it will be interesting to see how initial jobless claims fares.

Also, the continuing claims series is presenting the clearest picture of what is likely to be one of the most problematic aspects of this period of economic crisis namely how to make an immense and growing number of highly specialized (college educated) service/professional service workers productive again.

It's obvious now that we have reached the first real test of our majority services-based economy.

Unlike the "tech-wreck" of 2000-2002, our current downturn is very broad, leaving no sector and virtually no corner of the country untouched.

With millions of college educated workers now on the market incomes will clearly suffer but moreover, it will be soon all too clear that our prior bubble economy significantly overproduced service workers (particularly professional service workers) for which current employment opportunities will be scant resulting in continued and fundamental vicious-cycle effects.

The following chart shows the recent trend in initial non-seasonally adjusted initial jobless claims with the year-over-year percent change acting as a rough equivalent of a seasonally adjustment.

Historically, unemployment claims both "initial" and "continued" (ongoing claims) are a good leading indicator of the unemployment rate and inevitably the overall state of the economy.

I have added a chart to the lineup which shows "population adjusted" continued claims (ratio of unemployment claims to the non-institutional population) and the unemployment rate since 1967.

Adjusting for the general increase in population tames the continued claims spike down a bit but as you can see, the pattern is still indicating that recession has arrived.

The following chart (click for larger version) shows "initial" and "continued" claims, averaged monthly, overlaid with U.S. recessions since 1967 and from 2000.

NOTE: The charts below plot a "monthly" average NOT a 4 week moving average so the latest monthly results should be considered preliminary until the complete monthly results are settled by the fourth week of each following month.

As you can see, acceleration to claims generally precedes recessions.

Also, acceleration and deceleration of unemployment claims has generally preceded comparable movements to the unemployment rate by 3 – 8 months (click for larger version).

In the above charts you can see, especially for the last three post-recession periods, that there has generally been a steep decline in unemployment claims and the unemployment rate followed by a "flattening" period of employment and subsequently followed by even further declines to unemployment as growth accelerated.

This flattening period demarks the "mid-cycle slowdown" where for various reasons growth has generally slowed but then resumed with even stronger growth.

Until late 2007, one could make the case (as Fed chief Ben Bernanke surly did) that we were again experiencing simply a mid-cycle slowdown but now those hopes are long gone.

Adding a little more data shows that in the early 2000s we experienced a period of economic growth unlike the past several post-recession periods.

Look at the following chart (click for larger version) showing "initial" and "continued" unemployment claims, the ratio of non-farm payrolls to non-institutional population and single family building permits since 1967.

The most notable feature of the post-"dot com" recession era that is, unlike other recent post-recession eras, job growth has been very weak, not succeeding to reach trend growth as had minimally accomplished in the past.

Another feature is that housing was apparently buffeted by the response to the last recession, preventing it from fully correcting thus postponing the full and far more severe downturn to today.

It is now completely clear that the potential "mid-cycle" slowdown that appeared to be shaping up in late 2007, had been traded for a less severe downturn in the aftermath of the "dot-com" recession, and now has we have fully entered, instead, a mid-cycle meltdown.

The Big Digs of Deion Sanders

SELLER: Deion and Pilar Sanders
LOCATION: N. Preston Road, Prosper, TX
PRICE: $21,000,000
SIZE: 29,122 square feet, 10 bedrooms, 9 full and 4 half bathrooms
DESCRIPTION: The ultimate party and family ranch. 2 story entry, sunken living, banquet dining, your own Dave and Busters, indoor basketball court and bowling alley, indoor and outdoor pools, movie theatre, billiard room, hall of fame gallery, football field, 12 acre lake, tennis court, guest house, 10 car garage, furniture negotiable, approx. living area 29,112 sq. ft. and 38,831 gross sq. ft. footage in main home.

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Thanks to the Texas Twostepper we’ve learned that notorious egomaniac, publicity hound, sports commentator, reality television star (Deion & Pilar: Prime Time Love), and retired professional athlete Deion Sanders and his wifey Pilar have listed their farm/estate in Prosper, TX with an asking price of $21,000,000.

Not being familiar with much in the way of the manly sports, Your Mama had to take to the internets to figure out who this Deion Sanders person is. Our brief research showed that not only did the man play professional baseball he also played professional football for the Atlanta Falcons, the San Francisco 49ers and the Dallas Cowboys who in 1995 paid the well-built corner back $35,000,000 for a seven year contract that included a staggering $12,999,000 signing bonus. He later, according to the interweb, played with the pigskin for the Washington Redskins and finally the Baltimore Ravens before hanging up his cleats. Football players wear cleats, right?

Deion and Pilar’s property sits 10 or 20 long miles north of the Dallas metro-plex on more than 100 acres of flat lands in picayune Prosper, TX. Now children, we don’t know eh-nee-thing about real estate in North Texas, but we have a hard time imagining there are many moguls or oil tycoons looking to drop twenty some million clams on a house in teeny-tiny and not particularly prosperous Prosper, TX where we can assure you there isn’t much in the way of businesses that cater to Maybach owners and Gucci lovers.

Listing information shows Mister Sanders’ sprawling mega-mansion of indeterminate and indiscriminate architectural style measures a titanic 29,122 square feet of glossy marble floors, soaring ceilings, colossal crystal chandeliers and some of the most disturbing drapery Your Mama has seen in a very long time. The house is so humongous that the able bodied Mister Sanders often gets around on one of those Rascal scooters that are more commonly used by the old, the infirm, the physically decrepit and apparently, the lazy.

According to listing information, the multi-winged monster mansion contains 10 bedrooms including a first floor master bedroom suite with a sitting room that spins like a damn turn table, a large, round and orgy friendly bed, more smoked glass and black lacquer than we recommend be in one place at one time, a two story walk-in closet, kitchen, a behemoth bathroom with a garden tub (whatever that is) and a private 2-car attached garage separate from the 10 or 12 other garage spaces that house Mister Sanders extensive collection of tricked out whips located at the opposite end of the house.

Listing information also shows there are 9 full and 4 half bathrooms which our bejeweled abacus shows adds up to an unlucky thirteen terlits. Our tyrannical and seriously superstitious house gurl Svetlana would demand that Your Mama and the Dr. Cooter either add or remove a bathroom before she’d even step across the threshold because she refuses to enter a house with 13 of anything.

There are, according to one listing we located, multiple staircases, an elevator, 5 fireplaces, 3 dining areas and 7 living areas including a marble floored, hotel lobby sized living room featuring funeral home style curtains. The vast and seriously dated kitchen complex includes maple cabinets, marble floors, stainless steel appliances and black counter tops and accents. Other rooms include a family room with 10 tee-vees and 2 security monitors, a library, a solarium, a home gym, office, billiard room, a barber shop and something called a “Hall of Fame Gallery.” There are probably about a dozen other rooms for various uses we can not even fathom and there is a detached guest house in the back for all those who think 10 bedrooms in the mega-sized main house is not enough space when it comes to shacking up the in-laws.

Outdoor and recreational facilities include a multi-level movie theater, an indoor swimming pool and spa with some of the ass ugliest swagged drapery we have ever had the displeasure of witnessing with our own eyes, a two-lane bowling alley, an indoor basketball court, two adjacent outdoor swimming pools including a lagoon style number with a concrete island in the middle, a party sized outdoor spa, a 12-acre lake stocked with fish, equestrian facilities, pasture lands…breathe, breathe, breathe…a sport court, children’s playground, sunken trampoline, batting cage, a full sized damn football field (with goal posts), a lighted tennis court and a gargantuan game room modeled after a Dave & Busters which, much to Your Mama’s horror, is some sort of restaurant, arcade, sports bar and gambling parlor franchise.

We can’t imagine why Mister and Missus Sanders, who have three young children together and two more teenagers from Mister Sanders’ previous marriage, would want to up and sell this self-contained estate that while depressing to Your Mama’s delicate decorative sensibilities is surely a resort-like wonderland for pre-teens, toddlers and adult men who do not want to grow up.

For a more in depth peep at Deion’s digs check this out but Your Mama recommends y’all get yerself a nerve pill and pour some booze down yer gullet first.