the reports are coming, the reports are coming!!

company choreography
Today’s NY Times has a preview of the major firms’ Manhattan real estate market reports for the fourth quarter of 2009, which are to be released today. The dance is that the numbers were delivered to the press a day or two ago so that Elizabeth A. Harris from the Times and other journalists have a little time to chew on them to write an article on the day the numbers are ‘officially’ released. The hard part of the dance for The Miller and the other number crunchers is that the quarter only ended last Saturday; undoubtedly, they were dancing just as fast as they can (could) (while hung over??).

press choreography
The hard part for the press is reconciling different reports with somewhat different commentary and somewhat different data sets. Because they work in prose, these news reports have little inter-firm comparative data (so they use, for example, Miller Samuel’s inventory data without getting into why Corcoran always has such different inventory data [why oh why is that??]). Because they make deals with each of the 3 main reporting firms (and because The Miller has created a brand through his long work doing the PruDE reports), evidently the Times feels obligated to quote each of the firms plus The Miller. Because they don’t really have the time (or the interest? or the belief that their readers have the patience or the interest??), the Times can’t drill too deeply and still write a readable piece. They look for agreement and Big Picture, and this quarter’s headline is pretty clear: Sales Spur Optimism in Manhattan Real Estate.

numbers to come
The key data take-aways for me remain Volume and Inventory. The article implies that all the reports trend in the same way, but it uses The Miller’s numbers.

For Volume: Prudential said the number of sales increased 10.9 percent from the third quarter to the fourth last year, and they were 8.4 percent higher than in the fourth quarter of 2008.

For Inventory: The Prudential report found that inventory had fallen 18.3 percent since the third quarter of 2009 and 24.6 percent since the fourth quarter of last year.

the bull in The Miller?
As I said, more later, when there is more to chew on. For the moment, this was the single most interesting comment in the NY Times, to Manhattan Loft Guy at least, as it is from The Miller and it is more bullish than I have seen him be:

“There are a lot of challenges ahead for housing, but I think the worst is behind us.”

The Miller has not generally been in The Optimism Business, which the heads of the firms always seem to be in. I may find it later, but the statement from The Miller that has stuck with me the last year and a half was to the effect that The Market in Manhattan won’t be ‘back’ (or ‘fixed’ or ‘revived’ or ‘stable’, or some such word) until mortgages became more freely available. I will look in the Miller Samuel report to see if he comments on that directly, but it is pretty clear from the article that no one is saying that lending is freely available.

To be continued….

[Update, as I click POST: neither the Corcoran nor the Terra Holdings reports were on-line as of 8 AM, but the Miller Samuel report is up (pdf here). I need to read it.)

© Sandy Mattingly 2010