Three Cents Worth: Table Change By Dollar, Not Percent

[This week, our graph guru Jonathan Miller sets the table using dollars and cents, not those all-too-common percentages.]

In the effort to gauge the change in real estate markets, a great deal of emphasis is placed on the percent difference from one period to the next. The dollar amounts are rarely shown because it's harder for the reader to take a quick glance. This week I attempted to look at appreciation in dollars, by size of apartment rather than the percent change, trying to extract the pace of price growth by property type.

Last week I was given grief for only speaking to the luxury market, so this week I thought I would look at all apartment sizes and explore the differences between co-ops and condos by change in dollar amounts over the past several years. I looked at the change in average sales price from the prior-year quarter (2005 to 2008) and averaged the results for each apartment size for all quarters. The co-op and condo numbers in the table represent the pace of change in average sales price between co-ops and condos, not the actual difference.

For example, the average sales price of a studio apartment increased at a pace of $42,015 from each prior-year quarter, as compared to a $66,107 average increase for condos?it doesn't mean that studios increased only $42,015 over that period. That figure represents a metric for the pace of change in prices. Smaller numbers mean smaller pace of actual growth.

Studios saw a smaller dollar increase than condos did. It would therefore be reasonable to expect the spread to expand with the size of the apartment, but it doesn't.

Two-bedroom and four-bedroom apartments showed very little difference in their average pace of increase, suggesting that owners of two-bedroom co-ops and condos saw similar gains in their equity. Studios, one-bedroom and three-bedroom condo apartments showed larger gains, with three-bedroom condos far exceeding three-bedroom co-ops in the average dollar change in sales price. The larger three-bedroom condo pace is likely due to their inclusion into new developments as a favorite apartment size (they yield maximum profit for developers).

While this table shows that condos realized larger dollar gain in three of the five categories, it follows that co-ops may be seen as a better value for those same categories in the current market.
· Manhattan Dollar Change In Average Sales Price By Size [Miller Samuel]