Sales activity ebbed and prices leveled off in the outer boroughs during the first three months of 2006. Buyers in Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island now find themselves with more power in deal-making — and sellers may find more frustration.
Brooklyn
“The market is still very strong,” said Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Michael Moran, speaking of the Brooklyn housing scene. Moran oversees the brokerage giant’s Brooklyn offices — and recently bought a condo in East Williamsburg. “The last month or so, people have held off a little because of tax season. That’s a normal, annual event.”
Among the outer boroughs, Brooklyn in the first quarter remained the most expensive, though prices dropped from the same period the year before.
The average sales price of Brooklyn condos and co-ops declined 7 percent in the first quarter from the same time in 2005, from $551,000 to $514,000, according to a report from the Corcoran Group. The median sales price dropped, too, going from $505,000 at the start of 2005 to $500,000 at the start of this year.
Condo prices in particular declined sharply in the first quarter, something the Corcoran report attributed to an ease in demand for luxury units. The average first quarter condo price of $527,000 was down 17 percent from the year before.
Co-op prices fared better during the quarter, with the average sales price rising 10 percent, according to Corcoran, to $504,000. Townhouse prices, too, rose in the first quarter, but not by as much as in the recent past. Corcoran put the median sales price of a one-family townhouse in Brooklyn at $1.5 million in the first quarter, a 3 percent increase over the same quarter last year. That figure was consistent with anecdotal reports: Sandra Dowling, owner of Brooklyn Heights Realty, told The Real Deal that Brooklyn townhouse prices overall were up 5 percent in March compared to a year earlier.
The Bronx
The citywide housing market slowdown hit the Bronx the hardest. The median price of a single-family home in the Bronx was around the mid-$300,000 range in the first quarter, said Joe Hasselt, owner of Hasselt Realty and vice president for the residential division of the Bronx-Manhattan North Association of Realtors.
Hasselt based his median estimate on what he’s heard from fellow brokers and what he’s seen on the Multiple Listing Service of the Realtors’ association. While summarizing a wide-ranging market as diverse as the Bronx can be difficult, a mid-April MLS search for single-family homes in the borough in the $300,000 to $400,000 range turned up 12 homes; 17 fell in the $400,000 to $500,000 range; and seven fell within the $200,000 to $300,000 range. “It was difficult to find a single-family below $300,000,” Hasselt said of the first quarter.
It was extremely difficult, in general, to find Bronx home buyers at the start of 2006. Hasselt said the volume of buyers calling brokers had dropped incredibly from the fall of 2005, with the volume now only a mere 10 percent of what it was a few months ago. The media coverage of the housing slowdown and a leveling off in Bronx home prices, he said, created a perfect storm of bad market conditions for the borough.
“The market,” Hasselt said, “has absolutely skidded to a screeching halt. Buyers are nonexistent. The sheer lack of calls, when some should be coming in, is scary.”
Queens
Sales prices rose in Queens in the first quarter, but so did inventory.
In January, the average sales price for a Queens home cleared $500,000 for the first time ever, according to the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island. By March, it would settle back into the $490,000 range, still well above the average sales price of $440,000 in March 2005.
Median sales prices, too, crept upward in the first quarter. The median for a Queens home was about $480,000 in March, according to the MLS, down from January’s 12-month high of $485,000, but above all monthly medians back to March 2005.
While Queens prices increased from 2005 — and stayed high — the inventory of homes for sale increased as well. The MLS of Long Island — which includes Queens, Nassau and Suffolk counties — reported 60 percent more inventory in January of 2006 than in the same month last year. This rise in inventory is a reflection of a slowing housing market in Queens, but also, says one veteran broker, a sign of real estate brokers desperate for sales.
“I’m not saying there isn’t an increase in inventory, [but] the last four years, a lot of brokers were keeping listings in-house,” said Sal Crifasi, whose Crifasi Real Estate has offices in the Queens neighborhoods of Middle Village and Ridgewood and who has more than three decades of experience brokering in the borough.
Recently, Crifasi says, brokers have been pouring these formerly in-house listings onto the MLS, looking for buyers, who are now feeling empowered to hold out for lower sales prices. Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk counties had 25,156 listings by February, according to Newsday, compared with 14,652 the same time last year.
He said the Queens housing market isn’t headed for a crash. “I’ve been doing this 30 years,” Crifasi said. “I’ve seen the market go up and down all the time. When it comes down, it always takes its time.”
Staten Island
The volume of sales declined in Staten Island during the start of 2006. Prices rose, though they fell well short of listing prices for homes.
The number of sales for December through February declined 4.65 percent year-over-year from 1,075 to 1,025. The number of units under contract also dipped over the time periods, according to the Staten Island Board of Realtors, from 975 last year to 852 for this year.
Sales prices were up. The median sales price of a Staten Island home was $420,000 by the beginning of March, up from $399,000 in November and $375,000 at the same time last year, according to the board of Realtors.
But while the median sales price did rise in the first several weeks of 2006, it was still below the median listing price of $439,000, suggesting that sellers in the borough are not getting the prices they’re asking.