Manhattan pent-up Demand Chart

Posted in Buying, Market Conditions, Selling on January 7, 2010 at 8:24 pm

After releasing the Manhattan Market Overview this week and talking about the “release of pent-up demand from below-trend sales activity in the first half of 2009 as the cause for the surge in sales in the second half of 2009,” I wanted to showhow much sales activity was skewed higher in the second half of 2009. As an aside, I wanted to look at whether the credit boom impacted Manhattan seasonal sales patterns (that’s a stretch, I admit).

1) Top chart: The red columns represent the 2009 market share as measured in the percent of annual sales. For example, the Q2 ‘09 sales represented a 20.6% share of all sales in all of 2009. The gray columns represent the 20-year (1989-2008) average market share for sales in each quarter of each year. Q2 (spring) and Q3 (summer) were peak quarters for sales activity over the past two decades. It’s pretty clear that in 2009, Q3 and Q4 saw a surge in sales activity well beyond seasonal patterns.

2) Bottom chart: This is a drill down of the 20-year averages in the top chart (gray columns). I split the 20-year window by decade (first decade light gray, second decade black) and zoomed in a bit on the scale to show the differences more clearly. At 26.6% (red text), Q2 showed higher market share in the more recent decade at the expense of the other the quarters as compared to the earlier decade.

Correlation here is sketchy but it’s interesting to think that the credit boom screwed around with Manhattan seasonality a bit, showing more disparity (or volatility) between quarters.