Q3 market report season / numbers dribble in
NY Times strikes a “for now” stance on market gains
Today’s Times has the first report on the Manhattan market reports issued by the major real estate firms. Home Prices Buck Trend, for Now sums up Christine Haughney’s take pretty well, with a waiting-for-a-shoe-to-drop approach.
Four reports issued yesterday by the city’s major residential real estate brokerage firms showed that apartments closing in Manhattan in July, August and September sold for the highest average sale price ever and that the inventory of homes for sale declined over all. …
These numbers indicate that the real estate market was even stronger in the summer, traditionally a slower season for real estate, than it was in the spring, when prices rose in some segments of the market – like new condominiums and the largest apartments – but not all.
Here’s the however:
But brokers and the economists who prepared the reports stressed that the numbers mainly reflected buyers who went to contract for apartments weeks before the national credit crisis hit and before many people grew more cautious about buying. For instance, many of the co-ops that closed in the last quarter actually went into contract during the spring, and many buyers of newly built condos put down payments on their apartments months, even years, before their units were finished this summer.
how’s your elephant doing?
The elephant is still in the room, and this data will not tell us much whether it intends to stay, whether it will soil us all, or whether it will wander off stage.
The report I like best, of course, is the Miller Samuel report, which will not be available on the web site for a few days.
The Brown Harris report and the Halstead report [fixed the link] are based on the same data, as they are both owned by Terra Holdings, whose Greg Heym, writes their reports.
Terra’s lofts are flat
The key number from Terra is average price per foot for lofts, $1,128 in the third quarter, up 8% year-over-year but essentially flat the last three quarters ($1,129 in Q1, $1,118 last quarter). (See page 11 of the BHS report, page 3 of the Halstead report.) They report that the overall average sales price is up in Manhattan, both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter, measured on both a median sales price and average sales price.
Corcoran doesn’t have its quarterly report on its site yet, either, with no data nuggets reported by the Times today.
The most interesting Miller Samuel nugget from the Times is hard to interpret without seeing the underlying data:
The number of apartments on the market fell by nearly a third, to 5,204, in the last quarter, compared with 7,623 a year earlier
whether inventory?
The reason it is hard to interpret is that the monthly inventory numbers through August are slightly different, 4,897 in August 2007 compared to 7,784 in August last year and 8,118 in September last year. So I can’t tell if the quarterly 5,204 just reported is an indication of more inventory than recently, or less.
I hate to wait for the Miller Samuel data. Sigh.
© Sandy Mattingly 2007
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