[CNBC] Why Manhattan Condos Are Selling At A Loss

It’s been a frustrating couple of months listening to real estate communities outside of NYC, such as Greenwich, CT, and South Florida, talk about their “phones ringing off the hook” and the “fleeing the city.” They were incorrectly associating the phone calls with the ascent of the controversial new NYC mayor (hint: stop watching cable news). Sales are rising faster than inventory. Sales prices are rising. Rents were rising through election day. Those trends are not the result of residents fleeing. We would expect the opposite, along with panic.  The driver of the increased activity is record Wall Street compensation and (some say bubbly) financial markets, which tend to skew toward the wealthy. There was a recent excellent USA Today story about this: Are the rich fleeing Mamdani’s Manhattan? Not according to the data. I’ve recently written about this over on Housing Notes a couple of times: NYC Rentals Continued To Tax Affordability, But 4 Exciting Housing Initiatives Were Just Passed, and NYC Housing Wealth Exodus Only In Headlines and Hearsay. Robert Frank over at CNBC led a terrific, nuanced video on the subject: