Open Houses and Other Observations

Sure: there's a lot of them. According to this website, there are 1,768 open houses scheduled for Sunday. Since only 10,000 apartments are sold in Manhattan each year, that's nearly 18% of total annual Manhattan sales. And there are 9,595 open listings in Manhattan - a one-year supply. Add to that that not all properties for sale are listed here, and developers only release apartments in blocks so as not to flood the market, and there's a multi-year supply of apartments on the market.

Anecdotes are one thing; numbers are another. It still costs twice as much to buy as to rent, and there is a glut of apartments on the market. No amount of government help is going to fix that, until the affordability index comes back to equilibrium. To think otherwise is wishful - like the dot.com boom, when conventional wisdom was that startup websites were worth P/E multiples of 10,000 or more, when there was any E at all (which in most cases there wasn't).

My advice is don't bet against long-term equilibriums.

I've been looking at UWS condos < 1M. IMO there is a lot of junk or so-so apartments on the market. I think there is traffic for these apartments but I'm not sure if there is any real interest. There was 1 apartment I saw that was a good deal and was gone within two wks.