Average Home Price Drops to $660K; Hello, Half-a-Mill?; Keep an Eye on Condos

The uber-powerful Real Estate Board of New York has weighed in on the local housing market in the first quarter, presenting a rather comprehensive body of stats that spills out into all boroughs and that shows, like reports last week covering Manhattan, drooping sales and largely steady prices.

The most striking stat, as far as we can tell: $660,000 was the average home sales price for the entire city in the first quarter, and that represents a 23 percent decline from a year ago. One can easily make the mental leap: Another 20 percent drop in prices (totally plausible, given anemic sales and mounting job losses) and the average New York City home price approaches half a million dollars. Imagine the public perception shift!

Condos appear to be buoying the citywide average. The average condo sales price in the first quarter was $1,156,000, down 10 percent annually, but well above the average for co-ops of $518,000.

Keep an eye on the condo market, then, and watch absorption of existing inventory; once buyers gobble up the existing availability, given the lack of new development (there's a credit crunch, have you heard?), the averages across the board should start to come down. Whether this translates quickly into more sales is a toss-up: New York has a finite supply of housing and developable sites. Sell down inventory and prices could actually climb sharply as demand outpaces supply.

For now, though, at least according to REBNY, condos are the driver of the citywide average, and, therefore, of a lot of public perception. That perception could turn much sunnier or gloomier, depending on where one stands in the market, once the average tickles $500,000. (And just a quick aside: No one rattles off $1 million as the average apartment price anymore, do they? It probably still very much is in Manhattan, but you don't see it in newspaper leads or on the news or in the blogs that much. It used to be the capo di tutti capi of housing stats in this town.)

A couple of other takeaways from the REBNY report:

Average prices per foot in the first quarter:

Manhattan $1,162

Bronx $240

Brooklyn $368

Queens $316

Staten Island $262

Median prices:

Manhattan $846,000

Bronx: $360,000

Brooklyn: $457,000

Queens: $390,000

Staten Island: $369,000