As always happens at the end of a quarter, it feels like there's a new market report every time we turn around. Probably because there is! Here's the last of the bunch: the third-quarter reports for Brooklyn and Queens. As usual, Brooklyn is following in Manhattan's footsteps. The median sales price is up 5 percent, to $510,000. But the real spike was in number of sales, which rose 18.1 percent, to a total of 2,219 sales. New development sales continued to take a big bite out of the market, with a 17.4 percent market share. In North Brooklyn?aka Williamsburg and Greenpoint?the median sales price rose $616,041, and condos' share of the market ballooned to 87 percent.
So why the numbers jump in Brooklyn? We picked the brain of report preparer/Curbed graph guru Jonathan Miller, who explained that Brooklyn's "firm footing"?we're still at about half the sales level seen in 2005, so it's very much not a boom?is partly due to rising rents in Manhattan, which drive some folks to Brooklyn. Foreign buyers, a major factor in the Manhattan market, were also a presence in Brooklyn, but a smaller one.
And how did Queens fare in Q3? It looks like some of the improvement missing from the second quarter numbers finally showed up. Better late than never! The borough's median sales price rose 8.5 percent, to $385,000. But the number of sales fell 11.8 percent. C'mon, Queens, what happened to staying on trend? In Astoria and Long Island City, the median sales price rose only 0.7 percent, and in the borough overall, new development had only a 4.7 percent share of the market. JMillz describes the Queens market as "sideways but fragile," lacking the link to Manhattan rentals that keeps the Brooklyn sales market humming along.
· Market Reports [Elliman]
· Market Reports coverage [Curbed]
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