LONG Island and Queens home sales dropped 25 percent in the fourth quarter and the inventory of properties surged as the housing decline hit residential areas east of Manhattan in New York, Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers said.
Sales fell to 6,359 from a year earlier, Bloomberg News reported. The median price declined 3.2 percent to US$425,000, New York-based Miller Samuel said in a report issued yesterday. A total of 38,769 homes were on the market, 41 percent more than a year ago. The survey excludes the Hamptons.
"We're seeing real price erosion across every major market," on Long Island, said Jonathan Miller, director of research for Radar Logic Inc, a real estate data company that owns Miller Samuel. "Their behavior over the last couple of years has been the opposite of the city."
The price decline is the fourth consecutive quarterly drop for these markets and puts them more in synch with the rest of the US than Manhattan, where fourth quarter apartment prices rose 6.4 percent. The median price of an existing US home has fallen 8.7 percent to US$210,200 in November from a five-year high in July 2006, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Home sellers in the Northeast are having to lower their expectations as the real estate decline worsens. An index measuring signed contracts for previously owned homes fell 13 percent in the region in November, the most in the country, the Realtors group said in a January 8 report.
In the fourth quarter, sales in Suffolk County declined 28 percent to 2,341 homes, the biggest percentage decline of the areas surveyed by Miller Samuel.
The unsold inventory, which has nearly tripled in the market since the fourth quarter of 2004, rose the most in the historic and popular New York City borough of Queens.