With the troubles on Wall Street looming over the city's real estate market, Manhattan apartment sales have dropped for the third consecutive quarter, according to two reports released Friday.
Sales fell 24 percent in the third quarter from the same period in 2007, with nearly 35 percent more units on the market than a year earlier, said real estate firm Prudential Douglas Elliman.
The median sales price of a Manhattan apartment was $928,000 in the third quarter, the firm's report said. That was up more than 7 percent from the same period last year but down more than 9 percent from this year's second quarter.
In a separate report Friday, real estate firm Brown Harris Stevens said sales volume in Manhattan dropped 14 percent from the third quarter of last year. Like Prudential, the report showed a slight drop in the median price from the previous quarter with an overall gain from a year earlier.
In a city where an apartment purchase can take a year, the numbers likely don't yet reflect the recent turmoil on Wall Street, said University of Southern California business and policy professor Richard Green.
"It's still too early to know what the fallout is going to be from the layoffs that are happening and are about to happen," he said. "The 30-year-old investment bankers who are getting big bonuses _ you're going to see those people pull out, and they're going to have to sell their places, because their incomes are not going to be what they expected."
Still, Green noted, those with long-held wealth should remain fairly unaffected. And in a city where cooperatives have strict guidelines for financing _ with some more upscale buildings requiring the buyer to pay all cash _ an economic decline will make less of a dent.
Compared to home prices nationally that have been tumbling for some time, the Manhattan "numbers are still quite strong," Green said.
With the credit crunch drying up new development in the city and inventory levels that remain fairly low despite recent growth, it's possible that prices will not plummet as a result of economic hard times, said Jonathan Miller, president and chief executive of real estate appraisal and consulting firm Miller Samuel Inc., which analyzed the numbers for Prudential.
But with tens of thousands of layoffs expected in the financial sector, the picture that emerges in the first half of 2009 could be grim, Miller said.
