This first quarter of 2019 was a quarter of contrasts: in January the closing of a massive apartment at 220 Central Park South set a new record for the pricest residential sale in the US…this $238 milion gigantic sale skewed the numbers for the average sales price and average price per square foot..so let’s focus instead on the median sales value which is more representative of the market.

In the first quarter of 2019 the median sale price of a Manhattan apartment came back above the $1M mark…$1,075,000 to be exact…this value is essentially unchanged Year Over Year and it’s 7.6% higher than the previous quarter.

In contrast to the huge sale at 220 CPS we have the Manhattan market reaching its lowest volume of closed sales of any quarter IN A DECADE.

Specifically sales volume went -2.7% YoY to reach 2,121 units sold: while in the last 20 years the Manhattan market has seen on average over 2,537 closings per quarter. We are 16.4% below that level..holy moly!

So..very few transactions closed..and yet with mortgage interest rates that dropped a good chunk in the last couple months we are experiencing more activity in the marketplace and we expect more closed sales in the next quarter. For example the S&P 500 surged 13.1% in the first quarter, which is great!

One good sign: the average days on market is down -7.5% falling to 99 days, eight days faster than a year ago.

The absorption rate is up 11.9% to 9.4 months mainly because inventory is up by 8.9%. There were 6,673 properties for sale, a number of units which is in between the (10,445) record high of the first quarter of 2009 and the record low (of 4,164) in the fourth quarter of 2013. Finally, the market wide listing discount reached 6.9%, up from 5.5% last year, this means sellers are more willing to come down on price to meet the buyers at market levels.