The last week saw the release of three of the major Manhattan Housing Market reports: Corcoran, Halstead/Brown,Harris, and Douglas Elliman. The most consistent message in all three reports:
The number of Manhattan condo, co-op and townhouse sales are off a record 50 percent from last year. Sales in the 2q of 2008 were already below the peak volume.
Pricing
The Douglas Elliman/ Miller Samuel report noted that overall prices are down between 18% and 21%, depending on how you compute it. Halstead more or less agrees at a 15%-19% drop. Corcoran is showing about 14%.
More relevant as a measure of what's really going on right now is the median price of resales (everything but new development) was $725,000 in the second quarter, down 25.6 percent from $975,000 in the prior year quarter. As that quarter was near the peak pricing (again, dependign on which metric you use) This points to a roughly 25% price decline since the peak of the market.
As i have taken great pains to note before, all of the averages are... just averages. They are subject to various forces that skew the data. Specifically, they are always subject to variation in the particular individual units that were sold that quarter. With a large enough data set these theoretically "come out in the wash," but they often do not. More important new development closings really skew the conclusions in several ways. The general average includes those units. Leaving out those, gives the best picture we can hope to achieve.
The number of Manhattan condo, co-op and townhouse sales are off a record 50 percent from last year. Sales in the 2q of 2008 were already below the peak volume.
Pricing
The Douglas Elliman/ Miller Samuel report noted that overall prices are down between 18% and 21%, depending on how you compute it. Halstead more or less agrees at a 15%-19% drop. Corcoran is showing about 14%.
More relevant as a measure of what's really going on right now is the median price of resales (everything but new development) was $725,000 in the second quarter, down 25.6 percent from $975,000 in the prior year quarter. As that quarter was near the peak pricing (again, dependign on which metric you use) This points to a roughly 25% price decline since the peak of the market.
As i have taken great pains to note before, all of the averages are... just averages. They are subject to various forces that skew the data. Specifically, they are always subject to variation in the particular individual units that were sold that quarter. With a large enough data set these theoretically "come out in the wash," but they often do not. More important new development closings really skew the conclusions in several ways. The general average includes those units. Leaving out those, gives the best picture we can hope to achieve.
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