About Us - Recent Press | Halstead Property

More Real Estate Buyers Choose Smaller Spaces

By: Jill Urban

The city's second quarter real estate market reports have just been put out by the major real estate firms, and they show that prices continue to fall but activity is up.

"I think the news is that people got off the fence," says Corcoran CEO Pamela Liebman. "Sellers got real and buyers got busy, so the good news is that while prices have come down it presented a great opportunity and buyers jumped all over it. So we saw a nice upward tick in the number of sales."

The number of closings are still down 50 percent from this time last year, but activity has increased from last quarter. It's due in part to seasonality, but it also could be because lower prices are bringing more first-time buyers in to the marketplace.

"A lot of the closing activity in the last couple of weeks has been in smaller apartments," says Terra Holdings chief economist Gregory Heym. "And that's not surprising because you do see first-time buyers who make up a large part of that. Mortgage rates, although up the last few weeks, are still relatively low, for a number of those buyers is the availability of the first-time homeowners credit."

Most of the new homeowners are buying smaller apartments, which contributes to the lower average prices for the quarter.

According to the report from Halstead Property and Brown Harris Stevens, the average price for a Manhattan apartment is about $1.26 million, down 14 percent from last quarter and 24 percent from this time last year. The median sale price is down 19 percent to $795,000.

The declines seem quite dramatic, but that's partly because in 2008 there were record closings in high-end buildings like 15 Central Park West and the Plaza Hotel, which are now complete.

New development is still taking a hit as a result of the financial crisis. The Corcoran Group found the average price there are down 18 percent from 2008's second quarter.

Time on the market has also increased.

"Time on the market is just under 130 days right now," says Heym. "And that's the time from when you list until when you have a contract signed. That's up 48 percent from a year ago."

Experts cannot tell whether the real estate market has bottomed out.

"It's hard to say for sure if we bottomed out, but in my opinion if we haven't we are very, very close," says Liebman. "So it's very hard to sharpshoot the market. The only way to know if you've bottomed out is when you are on the way up. If the number of sales is any indication, I think a lot of people think that we have."

Only the next quarter's reports can tell the absolute truth.

Post Date: 7/3/2009

> Return to Recent Press List