The prices for real estate are going up everywhere – but in high-end New York.
Real estate prices in major metropolitan areas popped this past year, with San Francisco, Miami and Chicago up 25%, 16%, and 11% respectively, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. Barron’s colleague Jonathan Laing predicts a rise of 5% in the U.S. for the next two years.
- Tommy Hilfiger’s 6,000 square foot Plaza Hotel penthouse. For sale for $80 million.
- Credit: Dolly Lenz
One anomaly, in these across the board price increases, seems to be New York City. According to a recently released Brown Harris Stevens study, the average Manhattan apartment sales price declined by 2% in the fourth quarter of 2013, to $1,553,599, versus the same time last year. Inventory (existing properties for sale) is about 20% below levels last year, suggesting prices should be tight. They aren’t.Meanwhile Curbed NY is reporting:
The study points to an 18% drop for the average price for co-op apartments in the fourth quarter of 2013, a free-fall which dragged down the average for all housing. Co-ops are important because they make-up 60% of Manhattan’s owned apartments. Condo sales, by comparison, make up only 32% of all sales, so the 15% sales price increase in condos, to $841,278, has a relatively less important impact.
The precipitous 18% fall for co-ops, now at $1,120,930 average, is slightly misleading, because the last quarter of 2012 was distorted by this year’s capital gains tax increase, which prompted a lot of rich folks to shoe-horn their real estate purchases into the last days of 2012. Still, the median co-op price and the overall median apartment sale price both lost 1% this last year.
Hall Wilkie, president at Brown Harris Stevens, says that after a few years of increasing prices, buyers are again approaching expensively priced condos and co-ops with skepticism. “They are very concerned that the price is justifiable,” Willkie says. “They just don’t have the same confidence that prices will rise in the future.” Real estate players privately tell us that the populist and still relatively-unknown new mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, is one reason they are holding back....MORE
Upper East Side Mansion Asks a Whopping $51 Million
And from last month's "The Most Expensive U.S. Homes That Came on the Market in 2013" for example none of the $95M NYC apartments sold. In the "most expensive" list the hilfiger place only came in at #10 with four other NYC properties asking more.
