Brooklyn’s luxury resi market sees big dropoff in activity

A townhouse in Brooklyn Heights was the priciest residential property to go into contract in Brooklyn last week.

The five-bedroom unit at 38 Hicks Street went for about $3.5 million. It spent 402 days on the market but went into contract 46 days after it got a 13 percent price chop.

Overall, Brooklyn saw six luxury contracts signed last week, including three houses and three condos, according to the latest report from Compass. The report looks at homes in the borough asking $2 million or more based on the last publicly available asking prices.

The average price of those contracts was about $2.6 million, and the total volume was about $15.9 million. The properties spent an average of 165 days on the market and sold at an average of 3 percent less than their asking prices. It was a much slower week than the one before, when 15 contracts were signed for about $45.3 million.

This dramatic falloff was likely due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic slowing down virtually every segment of the U.S. economy. And the residential market is now due to see even more of a slowdown: Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week ordered agents to stop showing homes, as part of a sweeping ban on activities that risk further spreading the coronavirus.

The second priciest deal to go into contract, at $3.25 million, was for a townhouse at 58 Butler Street in Cobble Hill. The four-bedroom unit went into contract at a 7 percent discount after 191 days on the market.

Other notable Brooklyn deals last week included a condo at 102 Huron Street in Greenpoint for $2.65 million and a townhouse at 371 Hancock Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant for $2.2 million.