$10M-plus market going strong in Manhattan

Manhattan’s super-luxury apartments, those selling for $10 million or more, outperformed the rest of the city’s housing market in the first quarter, Bloomberg reported. Agents say this a big departure from the market’s recession-era performance, when buyers were reluctant to drop a lot of cash on a new home. “The market has done a 180 [degree turn] from last year, when you had it drop pretty dramatically,” Leonard Steinberg, a top agent with Prudential Douglas Elliman, said. “Buyers need confidence to buy, not money, and confidence has returned.” The median price of the most expensive co-ops and condos climbed 6.4 percent from a year earlier, while all price ranges together dropped 11 percent from first-quarter 2009, according to data from appraiser Miller Samuel. In all of 2009, there were 77 sales of $10 million or more with a median sales price of $12.8 million, the data shows. So far in 2010, 28 units have sold for a median price of $13.2 million. [Bloomberg]