Three Cents Worth: Manhattan Regional Sales in 3D

[This week, real estate appraiser, Curbed graph guru, blogger, and podcaster Jonathan Miller goes 3D, no glasses required.]

As much as I dislike 3D charts and don't want Curbed readers to wear 3D glasses smeared with greasy popcorn butter, I thought I'd use them on a simple topic. For each quarterly market report release, I group Manhattan into four distinct geographic regions and measure the market share of their sales during each quarter. This chart shows the market share of each region based on sales activity by region.

Here are the general boundaries?yes, I realize these are very broad definitions:

Uptown: north of West 116th Street and East 96th Street.
West Side: north of West 34th Street and south of West 116th Street.
East Side: north of East 42nd Street and south of East 96th Street.
Downtown: South of West 34th Street and East 42nd Street.

Some observations:

· No change in regional market share rankings since the height of the market in 2007/08.
· While Uptown has seen the most growth, doubling over the six-year window, it is by far the smallest region (in sales, not geography).
· Over the past two years, the East Side has trended higher while the West Side and Downtown have trended lower.

Expectations dashed:

· From what I've been reading, I think many would have expected to see Downtown to realize a larger upward shift in market share when in fact it lost 6.8 percent. However, in terms of new development activity, (and I don't have compelling metrics on this yet), anecdotally Downtown seems to be the current trend winner.
· East Side ended up with a 2.7 percent gain in market share. I would think many would have expected this more mature market (compared to Downtown) to have seen a decline in sales share yet in fact just the opposite occurred.

A 3D thought: I think new development activity drives consumer expectations for the volume of market activity in a vicinity because it is more visual than re-sale activity.

Next week: 2D.
· Matrix [matrix.millersamuel.com]
· Three Cents Worth archive [Curbed]