1.000.000,- $ für EINE Taxilizenz erreicht !

  • Junge, Junge! Wenn ich eine Million Dollar hätte, würde ich ganz sicher dieses Geld NICHT in einer New Yorker Taxilizenz anlegen!

    2 Taxi Medallions Sell for $1 Million Each
    Posted: 20 Oct 2011 11:23 AM PDT



    The sale of two taxi medallions priced at $1 million each was brokered by Nat Goldbetter at Queens Medallion Brokerage Corporation in Long Island City.


    The million-dollar taxicab is here.


    Two New York City taxi medallions — tin plates that grant the right to operate a yellow cab — changed hands on Wednesday for $1 million apiece, the highest recorded sale since the city’s modern livery system began.


    The sale was the culmination of decades of astonishing growth for the humble medallion, which is literally nailed to the hood of every yellow cab in the city. When New York issued its first batch of medallions in 1937, the going price was $10 even, or $157.50 in today’s dollars.


    Some perspective: The Dow Jones industrial average has risen 1,100 percent in the last 30 years. In the same period, the value of a taxi medallion is up 1,900 percent. That return beats gold, oil and the American house.


    Sky-high prices and million-dollar deals seem a far cry from the medallion’s early days; when World War II came around and demand for taxis dropped, many drivers simply returned their medallions to the city to avoid the annual $10 renewal fee.


    “It’s a lot of money, and it is an investment that someone would not make without being confident in the industry and the future of the city,” said David S. Yassky, chairman of the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission.


    The man who brokered Wednesday’s sale, a taxi financing specialist named Nat Goldbetter, grew up on the Lower East Side and got into the taxi business in the 1960s as a driver. He bought his own medallion in 1969 for $25,000, but sold it a few years later. “I could have made a zillion dollars, but I did O.K.,” he said.


    The million-dollar sale was hatched earlier this year, when Mr. Goldbetter received a visit from an old acquaintance looking to sell two medallions purchased for $80,000 apiece in the 1980s. There was an offer that valued each medallion at $975,000, but the seller was hoping for more.


    With many owners reluctant to sell these days, hoping for the value to keep going up, Mr. Goldbetter figured he could find a willing buyer. The papers were signed on Wednesday morning.


    “Nobody ever thought the medallion would get to this point,” Mr. Goldbetter said on Wednesday from his office in Long Island City, Queens, a few hours after the papers were signed. “It was pretty cool. It broke up the boredom of my work.”


    Mr. Goldbetter, a youthful looking 67, was no stranger to the historic: In 1985, he handled the sale of the first $100,000 medallion, a feat that earned a front-page article in The New York Times.


    “It’s kind of history repeating itself, only multiplied by 10,” Mr. Goldbetter said.


    There are 13,237 medallions in the city; new ones, when issued, are sold at auction. Large fleets, which can control hundreds of medallions, often find it easy to secure financing to meet the high prices. Medallion sales can make for big business: the biggest lender, Medallion Financial, is a publicly traded company (ticker symbol: TAXI) and shares its skyscraper on Madison Avenue with the Rockefeller Family Fund.


    Corporate medallions, like the two sold on Wednesday, do not need to be driven by their owners and can be leased out 24 hours a day. Individual medallions, which make up about 40 percent of the fleet and must be occasionally driven by the owner, are worth slightly less: the latest sale was for about $700,000.


    The secondary market in medallions and its private transfers began after World War II, at the starting price of $2,500. The value quickly grew, crossing the $50,000 mark in the mid-1970s. But the steepest period of growth has been over the past decade, when the value of corporate medallions nearly quadrupled.


    So are we entering the tulip era of the taxicab? Could a million-dollar sale signal the beginning of the end of the great yellow cab bubble?


    “No one is very good at forecasting the economic future right now, but I would say no,” said Graham Hodges, a professor at Colgate who has written a history of the taxi industry. He said the investment in a medallion is comparable to purchasing an apartment in Manhattan.


    “It will always make good money and pay for itself,” Mr. Hodges said. “There are certain things that are just gilt-edged assets, and this is one of them.”


    As for the first $100,000 medallion, it was sold to a young immigrant from Hong Kong named Stanley Cheung. In 1985, he told The Times that he heard medallion values were on the rise, and if the price kept going up, he might sell. “There are things better than driving a cab,” he said.


    Mr. Cheung did indeed sell his medallion: in 1987, for $125,000. After paying the expenses for his cab, Mr. Cheung came out about even, according to his wife, Shirley Cheung, who was reached on Wednesday at the couple’s house in Little Neck, Queens.


    “One million? Oh my God!” Ms. Cheung said, when informed about the recent sale. “I don’t want to hear about it. I have to sleep tonight.”


    Ms. Cheung laughed, and said that she was well aware that medallion values had skyrocketed in recent years. Her husband, she said, looks at the prices every once in awhile, but she tells him not to share. “It’s O.K.,” she said of the high value. “I just don’t want to hear about it.”



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  • Ich glaube nicht, daß jemand einem 2 Mio. Dollar leiht, nur um zwei Taxilizenzen zu kaufen!
    Was wohl einer der 'armen' Immigranten, die nicht wissen, wohin sie mit ihrem Schwarzgeld sollen!?

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  • Nachdem die Medallion-Preise in NYC bis zu 1,3 Mio. $ geklettert waren, fallen sie derzeit wieder drastisch.
    Der Grund ist UBER, aber auch Lyft etc.


    Yellow Cab NYC
    Andrew Murstein, president of Medallion Financial, says people pushing down his company’s share price “will learn that’s a mistake.
    Posted: 06 Dec 2014 07:18 PM PST
    Andrew-Murstein



    Medallion Financial, the only publicly traded company operated by a family that owns hundreds of yellow taxi medallions, saw its share price hit a three-year low during trading Monday.


    Medallion Financial’s stock has fallen 42% in the past year and was selling for $9.28 per share, the lowest point in three years. The drop in the company’s share price coincided with the rise of Uber, the San Francisco-based e-hail firm that has seen its own valuation rise to an eye-popping $40 billion.


    Medallion’s steep drop also comes amid questions about how the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission reports medallion prices. For years, according to the agency, the value of medallions—the city-issued permit that drivers must rent or own to drive a yellow cab—seemed only to climb, selling at auctions for as much as $1.3 million each. But an inquiry by The New York Times revealed that medallions sold for an average of $872,000 in October, a 17% drop since spring 2013.


    The TLC denied that its reports were inaccurate, but a trade group representing yellow-cab operators is calling for an investigation.


    Andrew Murstein, president of Medallion Financial, said he was bewildered by the drop in his company’s share price.


    “We can’t understand why the stock is trading down,” he said in an email. “Some people like to shoot first and ask questions later. They will learn that’s a mistake. All we can continue to do is put out impressive numbers, and the stock price will take care of itself.”


    He said Medallion Financial recently reported record earnings and zero delinquencies in its lending to medallion purchasers. It also recently filed a regulatory announcement reporting its intention to buy back some of the stock. As for the report about the TLC’s listings of medallion prices, Mr. Murstein shrugged.


    “To tell you the truth, we don’t rely on TLC valuations,” Mr. Murstein said. “We know firsthand what every medallion is selling for, as we have access to the purchase contracts from our borrowers.”


    Mr. Murstein claimed his company’s long history in the medallion business—his grandfather purchased his family’s first medallion in 1937 for $10—would allow it to navigate these choppy waters.


    “There’s a reason we have no delinquencies currently and have zero losses in 80 years,” he said. “We know what we are doing. Other lenders who might have relied upon the TLC valuations are probably very nervous right about now, but we are sitting pretty and ready to pounce on opportunities in the market.”


    But Mr. Murstein and his father, Alvin Murstein, who is chairman and CEO of the company, lose the most on paper when their company’s stock price slips: Together they own 12% of its shares. Wall Street firms including BlackRock, Morgan Stanley and hedge fund LSV Asset Management are the company’s other major stockholders.


    (In July, Mr. Murstein attributed his company’s then-13% drop in share price to competition for yellow cabs from tech companies: “Our stock is down a lot, purely because of the Uber hype,” he said at the time. “But our earnings last quarter were the highest in the history of the company.”)


    The company’s board, populated with bold-faced names like former Gov. Mario Cuomo and baseball legend Hank Aaron, is a reflection of the bullish view many took of the medallion market. But some of that exuberance has shifted to Uber, whose most recent round of financing appears poised to launch the company into the $35 billion to $40 billion valuation range.


    Yellow cab insiders said the stock price drop was no big surprise.


    “A dip in medallion values is only news to the public – not to the industry,” said Michael Woloz, a partner at Connelly McLaughlin & Woloz, a lobbying and consulting firm that includes yellow-taxi companies among its clientele. “There has been a decrease in asset value for several months now – and everyone in the industry knows and feels it. As for the the data, the TLC has traditionally – going back many years deep into the Bloomberg administration – calculated an average medallion price as well as the raw data for anyone to analyze.”


    Regulators, too, are grappling with Uber. The TLC proposed a rule that would limit the e-hail company’s ability to share drivers with other for-hire car companies, but reversed course after lobbying by Uber and rival ride-sharing outfit Lyft.


    The City Council is picking up that effort. Transportation Committee Chairman Ydanis Rodriguez introduced legislation last week that would require Uber to enter into agreements with unaffiliated bases before using their drivers. And Councilman David Greenfield has introduced a bill that would “rein in” Uber’s surge pricing, in which fare prices spike during periods of high demand.


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