monthly sales trends for Manhattan coops + condos, per Corcoran

small but confusing nugget
The number that jumped out at me when I got to see Corcoran’s Manhattan real estate market report for the first quarter of 2009 (pdf, here) is their count of what looks like closed sales, by month. (At least, I assume that they mean "closed sales" when they say Absorbed Listings. What else of interest could Absorbed Listings mean??)

There is a nifty table on p6 of the Corcoran 1Q09 Report, with colors, bars, a trend line and numbers. Go there for the better presentation, but here’s the nugget, excerpted and crudely presented:

Trends are only apparent in retrospect, of course, but February and March showing 700+ sales Absorbed Sales (from whatever sources Corcoran is counting) is mildly stronger than the 4Q and January numbers. For a frame of reference, the Corcoran 2008 year-end Manhattan real estate market report has another lovely table, this one showing quarterly "sales" (they actually say "sales" here) volume back to 4Q03. (The table is on p8; pdf, here.) [Update 4.4.09: the same chart is in the current report, on p4; d’oh!] Corcoran’s five year quarterly average is about 3,900 sales, so the numbers in my table above for the second half of 2008 are well below Corcoran’s 5 year average.

reconciliation is hard
I intended in this post to just highlight a possible trend — two recent months of better-than-the-terrible-4-prior-months. But I have to come back to this "sales" vs. "Absorbed Listings" thing ….

Seriously, what else could they mean by "Absorbed Listings"? I ask (really ask) because evidently it does not mean "sales". If you compare the three months of Absorbed Listings in 2Q08 above (taken from p6 of the 1Q09 report) and the sales for that same quarter reported on p8 of the 2008 report, you see that they do not match. (1,340 + 1,370 + 1,110 = 3,820 but the sales bar for the quarter looks to be about 4,100, and clearly crosses the 4,000 line.) The 3Q comparison is even farther askew, at 2,548 and 4,000.

Can anybody explain what I am missing here? If "sales" and "Absorbed Listings" are the same, the numbers should be the same from the two tables in the two reports.  Arrgghh…

Anyway, the months of October through January may turn out to have been the bottom — in terms of weak demand. (Interesting that the Lehman Effect could not have hit closings until 60 days or more, which would be November.) Or February and March could turn out to have been a brief (unimpressive) ‘demand rally’.

I hope to have better nuggets next time I hit the first quarter Manhattan real estate market reports.

© Sandy Mattingly 2009