A new report about New York City real estate says that properties in the market "continues to sell for astronomical prices," a report from The New York Times said.
According to the report, the city's real estate brokers claim that bidding wars are now "less frequent." They said that the asking prices of the real estate properties are increasingly decreasing, specifically for some luxurious real estate properties.
In a statement, Leonard Steinberg, the president of the real estate brokerage firm Compass, said that he noticed a great reduction of price and incentives for the past few months.
"I have seen more broker incentives and price reductions in the last few months than I've seen in the last three years combined. The market got carried away with itself in the first half of 2015. Some people went in with crazy pricing expectations," he said.
Brokers said that most of the price and incentive reductions actually come from what they call "off price tags" that were too expensive.
Hall F. Willkie, the president of Brown Harris Stevens, explained that "there is never a market for overpriced listings. If you haven't had offers or are not getting the proper amount of showings, the market is telling you there is not interest, and you have to reduce the price."
"In the last four months of 2015, about 1,040 available listings in Manhattan cut their asking prices, said Bennett Rosnick, an analyst at Compass. That's 20 percent of the roughly 5,120 properties on the market then, up from nearly 10 percent during the same period of the previous year, when about 520 properties out of some 5,380 available listings had price cuts," the report said.
"The average price per square foot of a condo for 2015 is $1,732, up $84 from 2015. Average sales price on condos, apartments and co-ops increased by about $100,000 to $2.6 million, $1.9 million and $1.4 million, respectively. Correspondingly, overall residential sales by the end of 2015 will jump from $22.8 billion to $24 billion, an increase of more than 5 percent. Overall sales, by comparison are projected by about 1.6 percent, indicating a demand that continues to exceed supply," Luxury Daily said, describing the growth of the city's real estate market last year.