NYC home sales down 40 percent, new construction returning slowly: report

The New York City home sales volume declined 20 percent between the first and second quarters of the year, and is down 40 percent compared to March through June of 2010, according to a report released today by New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

Though the sales volume declined, home prices increased citywide by about 6 percent from the first quarter to the second quarter of 2011, but remained 21 percent below their peak in the fourth quarter of 2006. Home prices increased nearly 8 percent in both the Bronx and Brooklyn in the second quarter, but were still 29 percent and 24 percent lower than their respective peaks. In the second quarter, Manhattan homes, which appreciated roughly 4 percent from the first quarter, were only 7 percent below their peak values

The report does find, however, that new construction is slowly starting to return.
“While we are far from the boom times of the mid-2000s, there were nearly as many units authorized for new construction in the first half of 2011 as there were in all of 2010,” noted Vicki Been, faculty director of the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. There were 1,556 units authorized by new residential building permits between January and June 2010, compared to 1,703 units authorized in all of 2010.

Recent reports have found the market stabilizing in Manhattan and Brooklyn

Foreclosure rates have remained steady in 2011, according to the report.
“We saw fewer foreclosure notices in this quarter than we did in the same quarter of 2010,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, faculty co-director of the Furman Center. “Yet, nearly 7,000 households were newly affected by a foreclosure notice in the second quarter of 2011 and nearly 3,100 of those households were in Brooklyn.” Fifty-two percent of new foreclosure notices in the last quarter were issued to two- to four-family homes, mostly concentrated in Brooklyn and Queens. — Miranda Neubauer