It’s that time of year again – The Furman Center For Real Estate and Urban Policy just released their seminal annual report. It’s chock full of an amazing level of analysis on all 5 boroughs and an essential download.

Here’s the executive summary and the full report.

Regarding property appreciation over four decades:

* Between 1974 and 1980, prices declined by 12.4% citywide.
* Between 1980 and 1989, prices increased by 152%.
* From 1989 to 1996, prices dropped by 29.3%.
* From 1996 to 2006, the City’s latest boom, housing prices increased by 124%.

A couple of interesting points made:

* On average, despite very high price levels, hous-
ing prices in the City have not risen as much over the
past two decades as they have around the country: in
the most recent upturn, New York’s impressive growth
of 124% was dwarfed by growth of 189% nationwide.
* Eight of
the ten neighborhoods with the largest increases
in the 1980s boom were also among the neighbor-
hoods with the largest price increases in the most
recent boom.
* Contrary to what one might expect,
higher-income neighborhoods are not insulated from
downturns, and investing in such a neighborhood does
not necessarily guarantee strong future gains. Rather,
prices in higher-income neighborhoods tended to
grow less than the City average in the 1980s upturn
and fall further in the 1990s downturn. In the most
recent upturn (1996–2006), there was virtually no
correlation between neighborhood income and sales
price performance.

In Memoriam: New York just lost an essential New York media icon with the passing of Braden Keil of the New York Post to cancer. Combining celebrity and real estate, he always seemed to get the scoop. After starting off a bit shaky, I grew to appreciate my interaction with Braden and will miss him – he characterized his situation to me in early January: Life is indeed serving me up a lot of lemons.

I speak now from an especially close perspective to cancer but with a better outcome:
Cancer – for lack of a better word – sucks.