{March 2022} The Buyer's Market Rages On
As our life returns back to normal here in New York, my parents are in a lockdown in Shanghai. They had planned to come back to NYC this summer. We were finally going to see one another after a long 2.5 years! I even bought tickets for all of us to go to Iceland! Please send us your good vibes to everyone coming out of the lockdown soon.
In the blink of an eye, the first quarter of 2022 comes to a stop. The NYC real estate market is very busy in general and frustrating at times. To the buyers, this is an exhausting market. On average, buyers lose out on a handful of places before they realize how high they need to be. Some buyers throw in the towel. To the sellers, this is finally their time after a long buyer’s market from 2018-2020. Prices have recovered - we are probably as high as the 2015 peak levels, but not higher. If sellers get too excited and too ambitious on pricing, their listings still will not sell. The rental market is bonkers. We just put a listing on the market. We immediately went into a bidding war and the rent we got was 25% higher than the pre-pandemic levels. Or 40% higher than the pandemic levels. With sellers getting more ambitious on prices and buyers revolting to some degree, the market is seeing less transactions. Total inventory increased a little bit from last month to 5.4 months.
Are the cute street carts from Blank Street Coffee on your block yet? The upstart wants to take up Starbucks!
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.