Shockingly low volume of sales

Strange.

I don't think that is in line, though, with the figures being published by Urbandigs.

It takes a while for sales to be recorded by the city and be picked up by SE. Of those 143, the most recent is from 3/23.

Of the 192 recorded in the last 14 days, 140 are March, 31 are February, 11 are January, and the remaining 11 are anywhere from February to December 2010.

So, it'll be a few weeks for the bulk of March to hit, and months before the last strays are in.

It also looks like they revised the Jan index value downward from 1878 to 1857. I remember the 1878 distinctly...

Nada, I only thought you weighed in to let everyone know what a crack lease negotiator you are. What do you know about condo sales?

There's only so many apts millionaires can buy for themselves or as an investment. The average Joe in Manhattan is not buying. Only millionaires have recovered from the crash, the Middle Class in NY is still suffering.

"It takes a while for sales to be recorded by the city and be picked up by SE."

But this was always the case right? Or at least as long as SE has been compiling it.

Yes. E.g., SE will continue to show February on the main page until it figures there's enough March data.

The OP was looking at the spiffy dynamic chart at http://streeteasy.com/nyc/market/condo_index, where March is still showing 143.

If you were to take a screenshot of that chart on the 1st of every month, you'd see how the values change as the data comes in weeks or even months later.

Currently, in Manhattan, SE lists 3,902 apartments for at least $1,000,000
Median price: $2,155,000 Median size: 1,700 ft² Median price per ft²: $1,330
How many Wall Street bonus millionaires are there? If investors are increasingly out of the picture, can the middle class (however you want to define it) buy and sell in adequate numbers to keep volume up?

NWT, the methodology doesn't change, and I have been looking at the index the day it comes out for the past few months. I understand numbers are adjusted backward as more closed sales come in. I hadn't looked too carefully at the exact number, but it is the first time I notice the purple line under the post-Lehman low of April 2009. The initial volume for January and February seemed light, but not as extreme as for March.

The condo volume may well turn out to be very low. But since SE has only one recorded sale after 3/21, it's safe to say we're shy a week's worth of closings, plus any strays from earlier in the month.

A better comparison would be the first three weeks of March against the first three of previous months, but no clue how to pull that.

Noah pointed out the other day that everybody's insistence on numbers at the first of the month skews things. For volume that matters, but for dollars not much.

What do you think is in by the first of the month? about 60-70%? anyway, I always check on the first, and I've never seen the purple line under the 200 mark.

I am guessing that the last week of a given month may show an increase in closings, esp if the month is the last 30-day period of a given quarter.

Most buyers would not care about this but some sellers might -- if the seller is a developer, it might matter to his accounting to close a transaction by quarter-end.

However having said that, I will not be surprised if sale volume is going down down down, because in a few Class-B neighborhoods in Bklyn that I am watching, prices have really dropped in recent months. (20% in Windsor Terrace, Ditmas Park, etc.)

Most of the have-to-buy-now types have now been culled from the buyers' herd. There are still some mega-bucks guys, but they are only going to be interested in Williamsburg and other status-y zones.

So outside the silly sector, transactions are probably slowing and prices in some nabes are definitely falling. Those of us in the wait-and-see crowd are saying, hmm, what will I see if I want another 8 mos? Another 10% drop? That would put me at 30% off-peak in some cases.

Will I wait for that? You betcha.

maly, 60-70% sounds reasonable, but I couldn't say. I use SE's recorded-sales query every day, specifying sale-date=anytime and recorded-on=last-1-day, and they seem to come in in clumps. Days'll go by with nothing new, then a bunch of new ones at once.

Right now condos are still showing one for 3/23 and a bunch for 3/21. Co-ops, on the other hand, show a lot for 3/23 and later.

Between the lawyers or whomever feeding ACRIS, then ACRIS doing whatever to the data, then SE pulling the data from ACRIS, then SE doing whatever, there're lots of choke points.

I think I know what it is. And yes, its the lag in sale data and filing date. Over at urbandigs.com, subscribers see our ACRIS sales STOP at Feb 27th, in fact we are tweaking the actual delay now.

The reason is because our ACRIS volume trends are based on SALE DATE, not filing date. So, Most of March's sales have not yet been filed which if we did go to present, would make the front end 4-5 weeks always see a big dropoff. So we finally tweaked our systems to adapt.

We are considering bar charts for filings, but since filings contain lagging sales that are all over the place, I think its not a very high quality measure to follow. I guess since its consistently bad, we can ignore it, but when I see filings today that have sales from years ago, and 12 months ago, and 6 months ago, I keep thinking about data quality!

The volume of closings used for our condo market index is only for Manhattan CONDO closings. Co-ops and townhouses are excluded. The 143 condo closings you see in our index are the the condos that have sold previously in a previous time point. The 143 does not represent the entire volume of closings. Please read our methodology paper for the repeat sales methodology that was used to produce the index.

must be the stampede SteveF keeps talking about

Hello streeteasy wizard, I don't think anyone was confused about the fact it represents only Manhattan condo closings. It's the extremely low number that was puzzling (compared to other months). NWT made a good point, that not everything is in on the first day, given the regular delay in ACRIS. However, it doesn't explain the ebb completely, as the methodology doesn't change from month to month, and 143 is way lower than the first day in recent months.

thx SE for clarifying!

Wait, on second thoughts, I'm still confused. Are the magic unicorns compiling the index from condo sales FILED in March, so there are no further adjustment?

@maly - I agree with you. Volume numbers have fallen off a cliff. Just look at that chart. What's going on?

@se - can you please clarify? Perhaps you could cite the relevant part of your methodology paper for us? Does the paper discuss how volume numbers are compiled, or just how the index is calculated? I understand that the index is based on changes in the resale prices of the same unique condo units over time. Not sure how volume numbers relate to that.

Astonishingly, I read the methodology at least 3 times, and didn't get at all that the volume number was only for repeat transactions. I went back to double-check, and it's either ambiguous or I am extra-dense (don't tell me). My reading was that the index is compiled from repeat sales, and nothing was said about the volume.
I added all the monthly numbers for 2009, and the total for the year is 5,169 units, which sounds about right if it were ALL Manhattan condo sales.

i like that:
steve's stampede

I just checked with Sofia in research and she confirmed that the 143 is an incomplete number due to the lag in recording sales with the Department of Finance. Putting up the March 2011 volume number was an inadvertent error since the index should only reflect the data we have till February 2001. This will be corrected later this morning. I apologize for the confusion.

yea that seems on par with what we see too with delayed ACRIS filings..Thx for following up!

Sorry. I meant to say February 2011, not 2001. Was typing too fast this morning.

On the positive side, you know we are truly reading your site down to the last itty-bitty-bit of data.

Kudos to maly! Keeping StreetEasy on its toes!