TYAToMLG: a great counter counts summer contracts + listings

old market trends never really get old

On Thursday I used The Miller’s new way of cutting the 20-year Manhattan residential real estate market into 8 eras in service of a post about a particular Tribeca loft with a long history of its own (September 5, 90 Franklin Street loft history more like a moving picture than a market snapshot). Today I look back at another of my favorite Manhattan real estate data geeks as a kinda sorta diversion from the daily grind post about recent loft sales as a Three Years Ago Today on Manhattan Loft Guy retrospective about using contracts and new listings as market indicators.

In my September 7, 2010, visualizing The Market / Manhattan real estate fun at Urban Digs, I used a post by the essential Urban Digs:

[in his] (The August Lull) look[ed] at monthly data for contracts signed and new listings, back to 2008. What he’s focused on is the Very Slow Summer we’ve had (for both contracts and new listings, both starting to slow down in May this year), but what struck me visually was The Lehman Effect.

Look especially at the way contracts signed fell off the cliff from October 2008 through January 2009, then slowly (very slowly) increased during February through April 2009. Nuclear winter, indeed. Of course, you may find other things here that will grab you.

For you folks who want current data (can’t we just live in the past once in a while??) I can’t help you much, but there is this helpful June 1 post from Digs looking at contract volume by month 2009-2013. While it (obviously!) does not contain this Summer’s contracts, your consolation is that you see that every one of the first five months of 2013 had higher contract volume than any of those months 2009-2012. To keep it apples-to-apples I will look for future Digs data for this Summer’s contracts, but expect that trend to continue.

All these charts from Urban Digs make up a diverting way to spend some time if you have to be inside on this beautiful weekend. And … if charts are diverting for you.

Note to self … harass The Digs to blog more, preparation for his new website be damned!

© Sandy Mattingly 2013