Home buyers priced out of Manhattan’s more expensive areas are increasingly heading north of Central Park to neighborhoods like Harlem and Washington Heights.
In its health check released Thursday of Upper Manhattan, which includes Central Harlem, East Harlem, Washington Heights, Fort George and Inwood, Douglas Elliman Real Estate and appraisal firm Miller Samuel found that price growth in the area’s condo and co-op market outperformed the overall Manhattan market.
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Median home prices, for example, were up 9.5% year-over-year at $575,000 in the final three months of 2016, while the number of sales surged almost 40% from 199 to 277 as the market provided more affordable offerings than other parts of the city.
While price growth is now outperforming Manhattan, Upper Manhattan house prices are still much cheaper than in their southerly neighborhoods, as well as in Brooklyn, which is attracting an increasing number of buyers.
"It’s right in the middle of the sweet spot in terms of what people are able to pay," Jonathan Miller, chief executive of appraisal firm Miller Samuel and author of the report, told Mansion Global.
In a further sign of how Upper Manhattan is becoming a more desirable area, the average number of days a property spent on the market fell from 105 to 86 year-over-year.
In Upper Manhattan’s townhouse market, meanwhile, it was a slightly different story. While the median sales price jumped 20.3% to $2.225 million year-over-year, the number of sales slipped 4% to 24, the average number of days spent on the market jumped from 56 to 228, while the listing discount (the change from final listing price to contract price) almost doubled to 11.2%.
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Mr. Miller attributed this to the fact that townhouses represent the most luxury segment of the market, and like elsewhere in Manhattan, it is softer at the top.