Luxury home prices slide

From Bloomberg:

Luxury Home Prices Fall in New York’s Long Island

Luxury home prices slid in New York’s Long Island and Queens in the first quarter as more property came onto the market and took longer to sell, appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and broker Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate said.

The median sales price fell 5.3 percent to $900,000 from a year earlier and houses took 25 percent more time to lure a buyer, the companies said today in a report. An oversupply of expensive houses for sale is reducing demand, said Jonathan Miller, president of New York-based Miller Samuel, in an interview.

“You’re just not seeing the demand level that you had been seeing in prior years,” Miller said. “You just reached a saturation point to what the economy could support.”

The decline in the luxury market in these areas outside Manhattan mirrors a drop in prices across the U.S. In Manhattan, the most expensive urban real estate market in the U.S., the median apartment price rose 1.2 percent in the first quarter to $835,000, the smallest quarterly gain in five years, Miller Samuel and New York-based Prudential said on April 3.
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In the first quarter, it took owners 121 days to sell their homes, compared with 97 days a year earlier, a sign demand has weakened.

The median sale price of a condominium dropped 4 percent to $240,000, Miller Samuel and Prudential said. The total number of condominium sales rose 6.2 percent to 1,312.

The weakness at the high end also hurt the overall housing market on Long Island, which includes the suburbs of Nassau and Suffolk counties, and in Queens, a borough of New York City.

Sales fell 6.4 percent to 7,001 from a year ago and the median sales price slipped less than 1 percent to $437,500. The number of homes for sale jumped 18 percent to 31,954.

“Inventory levels today are double what they were two years ago,” Miller said. “It’s a real issue. What that’s going to do is temper any price appreciation going into the spring market.”