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Prices of Manhattan Apartments 1.3 Million
By Tomoeh Murakami Tse Newsday, Melville, N.Y. The average price paid for a Manhattan apartment continued its rise to record levels despite concern by some in the industry about a slowdown, according to reports released this week.
The average price of Manhattan apartments sold in the past three months rose to a record $1.3 million, an increase of 8 percent compared with the previous three months and 30 percent from the same period last year, according to a report prepared for Prudential Douglas Elliman by Miller Samuel, an appraisal company based in Manhattan.
Falling mortgage rates, an improving economy, short supply and rising incomes accounted for the increase.
A few high-priced sales can skew the numbers and drive the average up. But the median price also rose to $775,000, up 10 percent compared with the previous three-month period and 24 percent from the same period in 2004.
Spring is historically an active season. But the rate of increase in average apartment prices actually slowed by about half from the rise seen in the first quarter, when fear of rising mortgage rates promoted people to buy during the dingy months of winter, said Jonathan Miller, president and chief executive of Miller Samuels.
"We had a return to a more normal boom cycle," he said.
Gregory Heym, chief economist with Brown Harris Stevens -- which yesterday released a report showing similar increases -- said sizable Wall Street bonuses were also a factor.
Supply also shrank "tremendously," he said, particularly on the West Side, which saw 20 to 30 percent decreases in available apartments earlier this year compared to the same period last year.
In Brooklyn, the median price paid in the first six months of 2005 for apartments increased 21 percent to $480,000 compared with the same period last year, according to preliminary figures compiled by the Corcoran Group.
Citi Habitats, a division of Corcoran, released rental figures that showed that average apartment rentals in Manhattan rose by about 2 percent in Manhattan during the past six months compared with the same period in 2004.
Studio apartments showed the sharpest increase in rental prices, at 4.2 percent; and 22 percent of all studios rented were in the Wall Street-Battery Park neighborhood, signaling a return to the area after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Citi Habitats said.
Ahorre July 1, 2005 08:39 PM