It's feeling a bit chilly for Manhattan's housing market, specifically the luxury housing sector, New York Post reports.
Manhattan's housing market has reached its peak earlier this year, however, it has been downhill since February as prices of luxury dwellings dropped every month since then.
Using the data by StreetEasy, which monitored resales in the uppermost 20% of the market, Bloomberg reported that the median price for Manhattan's most-expensive dropped to $3.59 million in October which is 2.2% lower than the numbers from a year ago.
Based on the data, the median hit its peak in February when it reached the $3.72 million mark.
"There has been a continuous decline for eight months and I'm comfortable calling that a peak," Alan Lightfeldt, a data scientist at StreetEasy, told Bloomberg. "The downward trend in that decline hasn't abated, and we haven't seen it wavering in any way."
Extell, a developer for sky-high projects, may come to see this as comedown especially when one of its projects, One57, was able to sell a penthouse worth $100 million in January, and is considered to be New York's most expensive single unit sale in history.
Excess in luxury dwellings could be blamed to builders who are chasing wealthy buyers and hoping to appeal to the upper echelons of residential real estate.
Homes for sale in the top 5th of the market had the most increase compared to other segments at 8.9% or 4,055 units in the third quarter says Bloomberg's analysis of StreetEasy data.
Meanwhile, the sale of modest homes is still on a roll with the drop of inventory by 3% in the lower levels in the latest quarter.
For Donna Olshan, president of Olshan Realty Inc., the slowdown in the top tier of the market could be attributed to overpricing, in which sellers should manager their expectations, she told Bloomberg.
Already some are adjusting and are lowering their prices. One of the buyers at One57 is already reselling at a loss, selling a $20.4 million unit for under $19 million, according to StreetEasy.
