Manhattan, still super expensive? While that reality is pretty much the first thing to stand out in the latest quarterly report out of real estate company Douglas Elliman [PDF] it isn’t the whole story. According to Elliman, the average sale price of apartments of all types has gone up 66 percent in the past decade, from $850,340 in 2003 to $1,417,080 last year ($1,084 per average square foot!). But the median sales price, however, was just $837,500—and if you factor in inflation, that is actually the lowest it has been since 2004.
That the price of the few bits of real estate available in New York County is going up shouldn’t be surprising at this point—that is what you get when you have low supply and high demand. And as the Journal notes, everyone always thinks Manhattan real estate is too expensive. Even when it wasn’t. Meanwhile, the really interesting things happening in the market right now appear to be in the middle.
It seem that folks shopping in Manhattan for real estate are increasingly interested in deals: “lower priced co-op sales” made up 60 percent of the market in the quarter, up from 49.5 percent the year before. Which isn’t to say that other types of properties aren’t doing well, too. Though the amount of luxury stock was down this year, the average sale prices for luxury lofts was up 10 percent to $5,868,442 (the median price was $4,440,150).
Much like the banana stand, there is always money in Manhattan real estate.
