Tribeca Property

With so much concern for what’s happening in 2008 in Tribeca real estate, I decided to drill down on the numbers a bit deeper.  Due to the number of high end closings at the Plaza and 15 Central Park West, the 1st quarter Manhattan real estate market results will inevitable be skewed upwards.  To counter this effect, I decided to focus on contracts signed in 2008.  By focusing on contracts signed, we remove the new developments and other properties that buyers entered into either last year or even earlier that are closing in 2008.  I subsequently pulled out the data for Tribeca to take a much closer look.  After what turned out to be a significantly slow start in January 2008, February contract signed activity was quite active.  As can be seen in the chart above, February 2008 contracts signed were actually ahead of February 2007.  This seemed quite a positive sign, but where do we stand for the year?  In comparing total contracts signed for January and February of 2007 versus those in 2008, we are about 30% behind where we were last year in total contracts signed.  How about price?

Tribeca Pricing in 2008 

Taking a look at the contract signed prices per square foot, we are hovering around $1300 after discounting for negogiation.  Not too shabby.  It seems that although overall demand is down in comparison to last year, there still is a good deal of activity going on.  More importantly, prices are normalizing and holding their own.  With over 50 new listings coming on in January and about the same in contracts signed in February, the market seems to be absorbing about the same number of listings that are entering the market.  This indicates that supply is remaining relatively steady.

Tribeca Supply

Let’s take a closer look at that supply.  With current actives hovering at about 235, the breakdown is as follows:

As the above indicates, almost half of the supply is priced at $3 million or less.  We’ll follow these numbers closely next month to see where most of the absorbtion will occur and how our supply will change moving into 2008.