Luxury 33 contracts highest on record

Wow....is luxury finally bottomed and making a fast comeback? 33 is certainly the most I've ever read about.

While it is certainly positive, top end of luxury (>$3000 per sq ft) is far from bottoming as there is still huge unsold inventory some already finished and other expected to be completed in the next year. The developers still have a lot of profit built in at the current asking prices and have room to cut 10-30% (432 Park for example can cut 25% on top of 20% price cut already and will still make money). In my opinion, bottoming will not happen for at least one more year if not two. In the meantime, $1500 per sq ft finished market remains healthy.

Urban, What do you see?

thx mercer - I don't know but I keep thinking of the scene where the penguins are waiting on the ice for the danger to clear and then the first one...boom...jumps in...quickly followed by another...then bam every penguin is crashing into each other trying to get in. :)

I think it is certainly true for $1500 per sq ft and it can go up as we have much less than 1y of supply, but for luxury over $3k, we have a few years of supply on the market.

yes there is much supply in the $3k market still to burn through. No one is building studios anymore.

It would be very interesting to know who are these buyers.

You mean over $3k per square ft? Plenty: Wall Street, Private Equity, hedge funds, Tech founders and senior employees, other senior executives, business owners, old money, top law firm partners and foreigners with more than $50mm net worth. But not enough to keep up with the supply.

Back down to 22 this week. Still above the 17 from same week last year, but indicates the 33 of last week was a bit of an outlier.