Manhattan apartment prices continued to level off in the final months of 2005, according to a fourth quarter market report from appraisal firm Miller Samuel and brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman. Decisively gone, it seems from the report, are the heady days of the summer, when the Manhattan housing market seemed to set a fresh price record each month, and talk of a bubble and its burst reverberated throughout the media.
Now, according to the report, the market has normalized, with slight increases in median and average sales prices from the third quarter to the fourth. Still, the maket had enough strength to set an all-time price-per-square-foot record of $1,002 in the fourth quarter. This marks the first quarter, Miller Samuel reported, that the price per foot for a Manhattan apartment exceeded $1,000. The previous record, set in the third quarter 2005, was $984 a foot. more