Manhattan Housing Market Inventory Plummets in April 2020

New inventory and contract signings in Manhattan continued to plunge during the third week of the state’s stay-at-home order.

The borough’s housing market saw 52 new listings come to market last week, an 89 percent drop from 476 listings a year ago, according to a report produced by UrbanDigs. The data firm compared the second week of April to the same period in 2019.

Over the last three weeks — March 22 to April 14 — only 209 new homes hit the market. That’s an 87 percent drop from the same period in 2019, which saw 1,603 new listings.

Noah Rosenblatt, UrbanDigs’ CEO and author of the report, called it “a very thin marketplace” and questioned how far inventory could drop “by the time we get out of this” in the report.

Contracts and asking prices followed the same decline. During the second week of April last year, Manhattan logged 243 contract signings; this year saw a 77 percent dive to 55 signings. The median asking price has also fallen, to $850,000 this year from more than $1 million in 2019.

Sellers also continued pulling their homes off-market, with 157 properties coming down last week, a 17 percent increase from 134 a year ago. Still, the decline is far smaller than in mid-March, when close to 450 homes were taken offline as businesses across the state began shutting down.

Rosenblatt said the slowdown in delistings is likely because any seller who wanted out already pulled the switch when the city began shutting down. According to UrbanDigs data, the number of properties coming off the market has fallen since the week of March 16.

With the exception of dwindling inventory, Manhattan’s residential sales market was largely unaffected by the coronavirus pandemic during the first quarter of 2020. Given that agents’ movement to properties and ability to interact with clients is largely restricted under Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s stay-at-home order, deal activity is expected to drop dramatically this quarter.

That said, some deals are continuing to close — but many of those properties went into contract or were shown to buyers weeks before formal measures were taken to combat the proliferation of Covid-19 cases.

Write to Erin Hudson at ekh@therealdeal.com