bromancing The Miller: squiggly chart explains (not quite) everything about Manhattan real estate trends

this is old, but so am I
You don’t have to be a long-time reader of manhattan Loft Guy to know I have a thing for The Appraiser Who Must Be Named, aka the appraiser who must be named The Miller as a sign of respect for his very public efforts to increase transparency in the Manhattan residential real estate market. His 3 Cents Worth series of now all-too-occasional charts on Curbed includes this gem from June 5, Condo Inventory At Low Tide In Sea of Bad Analogies, which with 7 years worth of squiggles and bars of monthly inventory data and text arrows, provides a snapshot of the overall Manhattan residential real estate market since early 2005.

Without tracking prices or volume, this chart packs a wallop. I suggest you bookmark it, as it is worth repeat visits.

The Miller’s focus in this chart is on new condo development sales as a percentage of all sales, and on the relationship between condo inventory and coop inventory. Long-time readers of Manhattan loft guy and anyone else familiar with the macro stats for this market are familiar with the trend points of 2007 being the year of greatest sales volume, The Peak in recorded pricing landing in the first quarter of 2008, the September 15, 2008 Lehman Brothers bankruptcy filing establishing a bright-line Before-and-After, what I usually term the nuclear winter settling in right after Lehman, followed by a thaw beginning in mid-2009.

With this chart, The Miller layers in the power of new development sales (and ‘easy’ credit) in driving the overall Manhattan market beginning in early 2006, then the beginning of credit tightening in the third quarter of 2007, bringing a slowdown in coop and condo resales but not (yet) in new development sales, because of the longer time-lag between signed contracts and new development closings. That trend was exacerbated by the Lehman bankruptcy, as overall sales volume plummeted. By mid-2009, the new development condo pipeline was thinning, and a year later coop inventory overtook all condo inventory, a return to the historical norm that had not been seen in 4 years of Froth + Peak + Trough + Thaw.

Great stuff. Play with it. Internalize it. (Or live a normal life; it’s your choice.)

© Sandy Mattingly 2012