memory lane: on outliers, or Bright Shiny Objects, this one a penthouse loft at 121 West 20 Street

Two Years Ago Today on Manhattan Loft Guy

You were warned in my July 4 post that you’ve got a couple of weeks of archived Manhattan Loft Guy material coming up; we are nearly done with that. In my July 13, 2011, penthouse loft at 121 West 20 Street beats Peak, but is it rational?, I considered a loft sale that did not make sense. Here’s what I said 2 years ago today:

Of course you know that any single number to summarize The Market (whether the entire Manhattan residential real estate market or the loft niche) smooths out a great deal of data noise. Some data points are close to the average or median, some are a bit higher or a bit lower, and even fewer (generally) are much higher or lower than The (overall) Market. I will leave the metaphysics of that for another day (note to self …), but will note that the outliers are the bright shiny objects that tend to attract a lot of attention.

When you deal with individual data points all the time it can be hard to see forests for the trees; in this case:

A lot more bright shiny objects like these and we would say that The Market for Manhattan lofts is back to peak pricing … but of course we don’t have a lot of similar paired sales. (Another note to self: check paired loft sales, 2008 and 2011.)

The Market did not get there in 2011. We have seen a bunch of these in 2013 (in which we may be back to peak pricing), which is part of what we see as bright, shiny objects.

© Sandy Mattingly 2013