cool Manhattan sales volume data over at UrbanDigs

bumps + troughs
Noah Rosenblatt just posted an interesting chart on his blog of average manhattan real estate sales volume (not prices, volume) from 2006 to present. Check out the whole thing for his explanation and cool graphics. He uses city data from ACRIS, so is probably over-counting a bit (I don’t believe he can filter for related-party or non-arm’s length "sales"), but that factor probably evens out over time.

It doesn’t go back far enough for my taste (but it is his blog, and more info is better than less info), but The Miller’s 10 year data show that prior years back to 2000 were (a) fairly consistent with 2006, and (b) much less volatile than 2007 or 2009 changes, at least as full year data sets. See page 6 of 61 of the Miller’s Manhattan market Report 2000 – 2009 (pdf).

Noah’s 90-day moving average graph shows how dramatic the mid-2007 bump was (what he calls "the new development boom and euphoria that came with the peak of 2007") and how the post-Lehman nuclear winter was nearly the inverse of that peak (though of longer duration, and not yet back to a ‘norm’). Good stuff, Mr. Digs.

contract signings soar
Noah tracks broker reports of contract signings, an interesting trend-line for analysis. Not all of these contracts will result in sales, though the slippage is likely to be small, and there are likely to be sales made outside this reporting system (as there are [a small number of?] sales that do not involve REBNY-reporting firms). My guess is that net-net, "reported contracts" slightly under-performs as a proxy for anticipated sales.

The key take-away here is that Noah reports 1,074 contracts in the last 30 days in this blog post, while if you look in the top-left he’s got (a presumably updated?) 1,170 contracts. Both of these numbers likely represent upper level trends for ‘normal’ sales volume, in real time. More good stuff, Mr. Digs.

© Sandy Mattingly 2010