While most of the United States has suffered a housing slump over the past two years, home prices in New York's Manhattan have been largely unscathed, propped up by demand from Wall Street bankers and the island's limited housing supply.
|
|
|
(Reuters) -- That could change as the housing crisis comes back to bite the banks that securitized sketchy mortgages, leading to layoffs on Wall Street and smaller bonuses for bankers who keep their jobs. "The market today is showing a significant reduction in new deals," Hall F. Willkie, president of real estate firm Brown Harris Stevens in New York, said of residential real estate in Manhattan, New York City's richest borough. Willkie said during the first quarter of 2008, Brown Harris Stevens saw the number of contracts signed in Manhattan fall by 21 percent when compared to the same quarter in 2007. The firm specializes in high-end properties, which he said continues to garner demand, partly due to foreign interest, but properties outside of this realm are seeing sales drop even more sharply, he said. "Any real estate market is based on confidence and that is what drives it, so with all the uncertainty on Wall Street that confidence has been shaken," Willkie said.
|
Comments (0 posted):
Leave a Comment