Has Manhattan sales pace dropped by ~50% during the past 30 days?

I think that is right Topper. But what I find much more interesting and much more frightening is the listings moving to contract. The recorded sales numbers are from contracts which were signed months ago before the financial turmoil started. Some of those if they are new developments could have been contracts signed a year ago that just went to closing.

The Streeteasy 3rd Q market snapshot shows 359 new contracts in September and 130 cancelled contracts.
With inventory at 8612 and 359 new signings that puts supply absorption at 24 months!
And if you figure in the cancelled contracts, absorption is 36 months.

Things have gone from bad to worse in the financial markets since last month so I am going to venture to guess that many fewer units went to contract in October. i think we are going to be shocked at how few units go to contract in October.

This is bad. This is very bad.

Correction. Manhattan inventory up to 8,683 this morning.

Some people use the "has address" feature for listings, but the figure without address is closer to what streeteasy publishes in its quarterly report. That figure is:

Sales in Manhattan
We found 8,974 listings
Median price: $1,199,750 Median size: 1,148 ft� Median price per ft�: $1,143

Last year's figures were an aberration. According to Miller Samuel:

"The 2006 number of sales total had been consistent with the 8,510 average annual number of sales over the preceding decade."

http://www.millersamuel.com/reports/

So there is slightly more than a year's supply on the market, but that is only half the story: an enormous number of apartments are actually available in new development, but not listed, or else under development. There are no reliable figures for this, but over the past 3 years building permits were issued in Manhattan for 30,000 new units, some, of course, rental (not that it matters from a price perspective) so there are probably thousands more available.

Then there's the matter of uptake - closings earlier this year are to a large degree on units that went into contract before all of this mess occurred. The key figure to follow is to subtract the total number of listings not in contract from the total number of listings available. You will see that that figure has gotten smaller and smaller over time, meaning that what listings are in contract are closing but nothing new is going into contract, which is why inventory is up nearly 50% from last year at this time.

And in my opinion, we are currently nowhere near the historical uptake of 8,500 per year. If we're running at half that, I'd be surprised, and it's getting worse.

Make no mistake about it - The Perfect Storm.

Thanks for the perspective, Jake and Steve - particularly as regards the difference between contracts and recorded sales.

From what I'm hearing from you, is the "recorded sales" tab not very accurate? It does seem to be out of synch with the StreetEasy 3Q report.

I was hoping that there would be a way to get a handle on more "recent" sales activity - particularly October given the financial turmoil. Perhaps there just isn't a source.

The brokerage reports have a sales decline of 40% Q3 2008 over Q3 2007. Given that most of that was before the panic, it sounds more than likely that we're down 50% at this point in Manhattan.