Look to the spring we’re in and to history for how well the Manhattan housing market should do this summer.
The inventory of unsold Manhattan condos and co-ops on the sales market has dropped during the last three months of spring. Inventory slid more than 11 percent from April through May and 25.7 percent from May 2006 to May 2007, according to Jonathan Miller, president and C.E.O. of appraisal firm Miller Samuel. These sharp inventory falls, Mr. Miller wrote on the blog Curbed.com, suggest strong sales.
Brokers, too, have been busy during what’s typically a beginning-of-summer lull.
Darren Sukenik is a top broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman who focuses on luxury sales in the trendier neighborhoods below 42nd Street. He’s sticking around the city this summer—and why not? “It’s usually slow,” Mr. Sukenik said of the summer Manhattan sales market. “It usually starts slowing down after Memorial Day, and it hasn’t.”
Any strength in the housing market this summer—brisker sales, higher prices, shorter waits on the selling block—shouldn’t be surprising. In fact, context is king in understanding the Manhattan housing market now; or, to be more precise, understanding the reactions to the Manhattan housing market now.
Simply put, the market hasn’t had the ups and the downs of the national housing market. No bursts, busts or slumps here—just more of the same, quarter in and quarter out, year after year, going back at least a decade and certainly running through the last few years. While not the most riveting story line, Manhattan as steadily successful perhaps best explains the housing market’s performance, now and as it will likely unfold this summer.
Over the last decade, Manhattan home sales have either gone up in the summer from the spring, or down—but merely slightly.
In 2006, condo and co-op sales increased over 9 percent from the spring through the summer, according to Miller Samuel. In 2005, sales dropped over 8 percent from the spring to the summer. In four of the last 10 years, sales have dropped from spring to summer, but never by very much; and both seasons, together, remain generally the busiest times of the year for Manhattan home sales.
In fact, it’s impossible to find a slow summer in any recent year. Take 2002, the year the housing boom really took popular hold nationally. The number of closed Manhattan sales dropped from the spring through the summer, but the number of summer sales—2,366, according to Miller Samuel—remained higher than in the winter or the fall.
Sales reached 3,474 in the winter of 2007 (roughly, the year’s first quarter), according to Miller Samuel, which publishes a quarterly market report with Douglas Elliman; that’s the most in one quarter going back to at least the late 1980’s.
The conditions that fostered such peppy sales—a strong local economy, particularly in financial services, relatively low mortgage rates, a bountiful supply of newer condos, the charm of a low-crime New York—remain in place as the borough eases into summer. Try, then, to act surprised at the end of the summer when everyone’s wagging about how healthy the market’s been.
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