Hello everyone. I hope you’re having a good weekend. As I do every Sunday, I’ve pulled together the latest Manhattan market numbers for you, along with a few things I’ve been thinking about this week.
Manhattan Market Dashboard
Active Inventory: 6,187
New Listings: 221
Signed Contracts: 227
30-Day Contract Pace: 933
Median Days on Market — Under $1 Million: 74 days
Median Days on Market — $1 Million to $2 Million: 64 days
Median Days on Market — $2 Million to $4 Million: 64 days
Median Days on Market — $4 Million and Above: 88 days
30-Year Fixed Mortgage Rate: 6.69%
What Might The Numbers Be Telling Us?
The numbers continue to show a market with plenty of activity, but buyers and sellers are taking their time. The 30 day contract pace remains well above the number of contracts signed in any single week, which tells us there is still a meaningful amount of business moving through the market. The differences in days on market across the price ranges are interesting, too, and worth watching as we move further into August.
My Sunday Thoughts
I read something this week that made me stop for a minute. There is a report that Compass has been encouraging some of its New York agents to pull their listings from StreetEasy for a period of time as part of a fall marketing strategy. The story also mentioned discussions involving other large brokerage firms, which makes the whole thing a little more interesting to me.
I don’t know where this is going, and I’m not particularly interested in taking sides. What caught my attention is how different the real estate business has become. StreetEasy is so much a part of the way we work in New York that it is easy to forget there was a time when nothing like it existed. You had your office, your Rolodex, the phone, the newspapers, open houses and a lot of time spent getting to know people.
Technology has made the business easier in a lot of ways. It has also changed the relationship between the agent and the information the agent uses every day. That’s probably why this story caught my attention. It isn’t really about one website. It made me think about how much of our business now lives on platforms that somebody else controls.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Every generation of agents has had tools that changed the way we work. The tools change, we adapt, and then a few years later we wonder how we ever worked without them.
I was also thinking about how important it is for an agent to have something that belongs to the agent. Your relationships belong to you. Your knowledge of the neighborhoods belongs to you. Your knowledge of the process belongs to you. You know how a deal is made, what needs to happen along the way, and how to get it from the first conversation with a client to the closing. The trust you build with a client belongs to you, too. Those things stay with you when the technology changes.
Think Beyond The Deal,
George