Manhattan townhouse sales volume keeps sagging, but prices keep climbing on the deals that do close on these top-end properties.
The Harkness Mansion at 4 East 75th Street sold for $53 million in October, the New York Post reported, the highest price for a single residential deal in Manhattan.
“It’s just the most magnificent, widest house in New York City,” said Paula Del Nunzio, the listing broker and a senior vice president and managing director at Brown Harris Stevens. “There’s no other mansion on the market now that’s 50 feet wide.”
The five-story house has a 22,000-square foot interior and 1,200-square-foot, second-level terrace. Del Nunzio would not comment on the terms of the deal.
Even though townhouses can sell for exorbitant prices, the Harkness Mansion is the only example of its kind.
“It’s a truly unique property, right off the park,” said Kinnaird Fox, director of townhouse sales for Wohlfarth & Associates Real Estate. “The scope and the scale of the house bump it up to a class in and of itself.”
Though no other sales compared to the record-setting Harkness deal, the average price of an East Side townhouse rose to $9.37 million for the third quarter of 2006, compared to $7.55 million for the same period last year, according to the Corcoran Group.
Across the park, in the Upper West Side townhouse market where Fox specializes, there are some pricey townhouses, but only a handful list for more than $10 million, she said. The West Side saw an increase in the average sale price of a townhouse to $5.37 million in the third quarter from $4.3 million during the same period last year.
Meanwhile, the average townhouse price in the Downtown market during the same period dropped to $4.99 million from $5.89 million. The dip in Downtown prices is due to the closure last year of two high-priced deals of around $10 million, said Pam Liebman, president and CEO of Corcoran.
Median prices in all three townhouse markets increased this year from last year, the Corcoran data show.
While prices were up, the number of townhouse sales dropped across the board in Manhattan for the third quarter of 2006.
Fifteen houses sold on the East Side compared to 23 in the third quarter in 2005; on the West Side, nine sold this year versus 21 last year; in the Downtown area, 19 sold this year and 24 last year, the Corcoran numbers show.
“I don’t think these numbers are telling us anything is wrong with the townhouse market,” Liebman said. “The townhouse market remains strong,” she added, though she acknowledged that “anything overpriced is not moving.”
Citywide, the value of all class one properties, consisting primarily of one-, two- and three-family homes, increased 14.6 percent to a total market value of $325.1 billion, according to the city’s 2006 fiscal year annual real property tax report released last month. The fiscal year runs from July 1, 2005, to June 30, 2006.
One-, two- and three-family houses, both attached and freestanding houses, make up a fairly large percentage of houses in the city due to high numbers of these properties in the outer boroughs.
Of the 959,358 singly owned, rather than rented, residential properties in the city (most housing stock in the city is rental), 643,187 were one-, two- and three-family homes, the property tax report showed. Queens was home to the largest number of such homes with 272,138; Brooklyn had 200,769; Staten Island had 104,021; the Bronx had 60,971; and Manhattan had 5,288.
Rising townhouse values are also evident in the city’s tight rental market.
In September, Mark David & Company negotiated the rental of a 10,000-square-foot Manhattan townhouse for $65,000 a month, plus utilities. That was the company’s biggest rental deal ever, company president Mark David Fromm said.
“We see more people renting apartments, so I think it would follow that people would be renting out townhouses more,” said Gregory Heym, chief economist at Terra Holdings, parent company of Brown Harris Stevens and Halstead.
Steve Hallerman, a Citi Habitats agent who brokers townhouse deals, said there are few townhouse rentals on the market.
On a random day last month, in a multiple real estate company search for Manhattan townhouses with asking rents of up to $70,000, Hallerman found 108 Manhattan listings. The highest asking price was $39,000 month.
“One hundred eight doesn’t seem like a lot of listings,” Hallerman said.