{January 2023} New Year, New Market?
This January was the first Chinese New Year my parents spent in NYC with us. In the past, we have always gone back. But the pandemic changed the pattern for us. Moving from gathering to gathering, we were surrounded by friends. To our pleasant surprise, my parents said this year the CNY was more Chinese than it was in China! I suppose we really treasure our heritage now that we have left. And in New York, the Chinese community is large enough for the traditions to flourish!
The NYC real estate market has the first signs of a recovery in January. For the first time in 7 months, more buyers agree that buying now could be a good idea, as opposed to waiting. From conversations with our own buyers, we sense that people are feeling better. More people think that the rates are stabilizing and we are not going to have a hard recession. In the meantime, supply has continued to drop. Total supply in Manhattan contracted for 3 straight months, going from 6.5 months in Oct 2022 to 5.4 months in Jan 2023. One of our buyers decided to make an offer after having been looking for about a year. There were 3 places of interest. One was asking too high. The other two both had contracts out when I approached them with our offers. Both listings had reasonable asking prices. Both contracts went out in the last two weeks. We are not advising our sellers to sell yet but we are advising our buyers to buy.
Good Read:
Read here to brush up on all the buzz around converting offices to 20,000 residential units in NYC.
The NYC real estate market is at an interesting crossroad. On the one hand, we feel a lot of pent-up demand from buyers who have been watching and waiting for rates to go down.