Prices Falling on the Northern Edges of Manhattan
Buoyed by foreign buyers and the deep pockets of workers in high-paying industries like investment banking and consulting, New York has largely bucked the trend of declining prices and declining sales. At least, that is, until now, according to this story in Wednesday’s Journal.
Interestingly, while sales are softening and properties are staying on the market longer, prices, according to the report, are up by 13% for the quarter year-over-year. That might be the overall picture, but in at least one pocket of Manhattan prices seem to be falling.
In my uptown Manhattan neighborhood, which sits between the George Washington Bridge and the expansive Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters, a quick search of StreetEasy.com shows that of the only 40 apartments listed at under $1 million in the neighborhood, nearly two-dozen have been reduced at least 5%. A handful of one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments have seen reductions of 10% or more. One, in a nice building on a quiet street has been on the market for nine months and has seen price reductions totaling nearly 20%.
In Inwood, even further north, 7 out of 22 listings showed a decrease of 5% or more. Even in Morningside Heights, near Columbia University and a little closer to the core of the city, 9 out of 32 listings — or 28% — showed price decreases of 5% or more, with similar stats for the neighborhood just above it, Hamilton Heights.
Meanwhile, in the much more popular and centrally located neighborhood of Gramercy Park, StreetEasy only listed 12 apartments in the same search whose prices were reduced 5% or more — out of nearly 300 listings. When I ran the search for all of Manhattan, only about 12% of all apartments had seen their prices reduced.
New York Magazine, this week, did a similar survey of the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn, to shore up the argument that in a downturn the “outlying neighborhoods, the ones that are comparatively recently gentrified, show the signs of a price drop first.”
The magazine posits that Park Slope is the canary in the coal mine — a signal of a real-estate market about to slide. I wonder, is my neighborhood, with its leafy streets and good schools, sending out a similar warble? Readers, if you’re living a market that’s been relatively unscathed by declining prices, do you see any local signs of coming trouble? –Jennifer Merritt
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