Chris Halliburton Brings Warburg to Harlem

By Greg Thomas

A native New Yorker, Chris graduated from Tufts University where he majored in political science and psychology. Among 22 students recruited from top 20 colleges nationwide for posts at Aetna Life & Casualty, he moved to Manhattan and spent many years designing and implementing pension/retirement plans as well as employee benefit programs for major corporations. From the financial world he transferred his business savvy to the film industry where he represented directors and produced music videos and commercials extensively throughout the US and Europe . Chris pursued his passion for real estate as a profession after running his own thriving film production company.

Greg Thomas: What are Warburg’s goals for its uptown office?

CH: To establish a foothold in the upper Manhattan market on the brokerage end. We want to be the major player in the real estate brokerage market. Right now, in the balance of this year, we’ll introduce ourselves to the community, develop goodwill and rapport, and establish ourselves as a resource. In my experience in Harlem, it has been difficult, at best, to find someone to go to who would give you not only a well-thought out and researched answer to your question about real property, but also provide a place in which to discuss it. We will welcome you to come in and ask questions and to get answers to your questions and not be upstairs on the second floor or in the back of some other space or down on 57^th St. or 86th St. or 79th St. where you can’t really walk around the corner and ask: “I’m having problems with this property next door to me, would you know what’s going on with it?”

HW: What kind of investment is Warburg making in the uptown office? What’s Warburg spending to establish this office?

CH: It’s a 15-year commitment. It’s a many- million-dollar commitment.

HW: What has been your observation on what’s been going on in Harlem real estate and the changes that have occurred over the last 10-20 years?

CH: It was only a matter of time before Harlem became attractive to developers and financial institutions as a place to build new housing and renovate existing housing because there’s just a finite amount of it on the island as a whole. You just have more and more people that want to be here, whether that’s on a full-time basis or just having an apartment here.

Over the years, you had speculators, church and community groups, and individual investors that actually lived in Harlem and came from outside of Harlem that saw what was going on or felt that something was going to happen and were buying properties left and right. It’s interesting how over the arc of time just how the value of the properties have increased; not only the active properties that have tenants in them, but ‘shells’—buildings that just have four walls and sometimes no roof and they’ve just become very valuable.

The other social phenomenon that has been taking place has been the desire to have a better quality of life regardless of the perception of where you live. People are moving to areas and buying homes based on ‘what I get when I close my door’—what’s on the inside and not necessarily what I have to do on the outside. There’s been the trend in the last 10-12 years of people not wanting to commute four hours a day, leaving for work before the kids get up and when you come home, they’re already asleep. So, now, instead, they’re thinking about buying a brownstone, renovating it and they’re a lot closer to their jobs.

HW: What about those who have been living here, or renting here, and are being priced out of the market? (i.e. gentrification)

CH: Fortunately, the local “authorities” (Assemblyman Keith Wright, Sen. David Patter-son, Congressman Charles Rangel or the Abyssinian Baptist Church, or the NYC Housing Partnership, HPD, etc.) have done a fairly good job of keeping and creating middle-income, affordable housing on different scales for the existing community; the long-time residents. What, unfortunately, has happened is that some of the residents may not have kept up with what are the bands of income defined under affordable housing as they have increased. With some of the affordable housing programs, the incomes are $60,000 for a single and $150,000 for a family or four and that’s based on the guidelines that were set years ago that were just increased based on keeping pace with inflation and cost of living increases.

HW: What about low-income housing?

CH: There has been the creation of affordable housing units on the rental side to address some of that and there have been some affordable housing units created for home owner-ship purposes that have been addressing the lower-income brackets. But, what needs to happen is that some of the programs that were instituted in the 1970s (i.e. The TILL Program [that established Mitchell-Lama] or Housing Development Fund Program) need to be revamped as a vehicle to address the home ownership needs of the lower-income bracket. Back then, it [TILL] was set up as an affordable program so you could buy a two bedroom apartment for $500. And now that we’ve come 25 years since, maybe that program should be reconfigured; let’s use certain logical percentages so that the people who are the tenants can make a reasonable profit—but let’s not forget the fact that they were subsidized in the sense to get this and then turn this property over to the next group of people so that maybe a person or a family of three or four that have been living in a housing project but now have gotten to the point where maybe their gross family income is $75,000, they could then go take that property and pay $100,000 for a three-bedroom apartment instead of someone selling it out on the market for $250,000 or $300,000. So, that way, you’re getting somebody from the housing project into home ownership the same way they did it 25 years ago, as opposed to letting the program just go wild and run free.

It would be a way to not only maintain the fabric of the community, but to help people move from being renters to owners and it’s all the guise of a program that was set up by the city anyway. You could make it a win-win situation for everybody, as opposed to a situation that will ultimately be exploited.

HW: Could you tell us an anecdote from the past three years about a place you have brokered where there was a family that made the transition to being in an apartment and finally become homeowners? Or are most people that you deal with already homeowners and are just upgrading?

CH: I had a woman of African and Latino descent [in March] who was renting in the 110s or 120s and really wanted to buy a house and had to enlist the help of her father to do it. I found them this house that needed to be renovated that she really liked and it had a squatter in it—it was a man masquerading as a woman. Most people would not take on such a chore to buy as property with a tenant and depend on the court systems to get the person out so they could occupy the space. It took a while—a lot of due diligence and a lot of supporting documents that I had to submit to the bank to help her get to the point where she would be able to finance this thing. When her mother and father and she came into the conference room of the lawyer’s office on the day that we were closing, it was just a really great experience to see him and his wife and his daughter and how happy they were that she was actually going to have a home. It was a great feeling for me and a great moment to be involved in, particularly after all the things we had gone through to get to that point.

It probably took about four months to get the house; that’s not inexorably long, but it was very concentrated work that went into it, with engineers, contractors, appraisers, and analyzing and getting the comps to justify it and working with the bank and the Dept. of Buildings about the violations, etc. She’s now living on 136^th St. right around the corner from Harlem Hospital ; they have control of three floors and are working on getting the squatter out of the fourth floor and construction will start soon.