A Glimpse Into The "ACRIS" Closed Sales Lag

A: I think every Manhattan broker should read this and fully understand the final lag in the Closed Sales equation. Quarterly market reports are uber-lagging and represent a market from say 3-6 months ago, at minimum. We all know that when a transaction closes the deal is done and should be available for use as a comparable sale. But when it gets recorded as public record is another story. For this piece, you must understand the difference between the SALE DATE and the RECORDED/FILING DATE. I've been going over recorded sales in the past few weeks tracking this 'gap' and let me tell you, 'its all over the place'!

Let me show you. First off, the date I picked for this discussion was February 28th, 2011 where we have 58 Recorded Sales Filings. Now, let me break down the lag between "filing date" and actual "sale date" this way first and then I will show you one of the crazy outliers:

Of the 58 Recorded Sales filings on February 28th, 2011:

28, or 48%, actually sold less than 2 weeks prior ---> the fastest filing was a sale on Feb 22nd

15, or 26%, actually sold between 2-4 weeks ago

4, or 7%, actually sold between 4-6 weeks ago

3, or 5%, actually sold between 6-8 weeks ago

8, or 14%, actually sold 8+ weeks ago ---> the slowest filing was a sale on January 28th, 2003!

Talk about an outlier! If we wanted to measure the average lag between "filing date" and actual "sale date" of the transaction, think of how a sale from over 8 years ago would screw with the data! It sounds like a mistake, but it's not! Let me show you.

The sale from January 28th, 2003 was at 99 Jane Street, unit 4D. Let me show you a) the ACRIS filing and b) a partial snapshot of UrbanDigs list of all filings on Feb. 28th, 2011:

1. The ACRIS Recorded Document for 99 Jane Street, Unit 4D



2. UrbanDigs Confirmation Plus Other Feb 28th, 2011 ACRIS File Recordigs

Below is a partial snapshot showing most of Page 1 of 3 for Feb 28th sales filings. The 58 sales are before 'cleansing rules' kick in to eliminate the non-residential sales - think storage unit sales, duplicates, and other strange transfers that always need to be excluded from market metrics.

For ease, I sorted by SALE DATE so you can see the earliest sales that finally made its way to public record about a week ago. The 99 Jane St, unit 4D sale in 2003 is outlined at the top! Then you got 7, count em', 7 recorded filings of sales that occurred in 2010! I highlighted the 2003 sale in red border and the seven 2010 sales in green border:


So, 14% of the 58 residential sales filings recorded on February 28th, 2011, actually sold and closed in January, February, November & December of 2010! Full disclosure folks! Its important to understand the lag because these are the sales that are fueling brokerage firms' Quarterly Market Reports! There has to be a way government can make the public recording of NYC sales transactions more efficient! I think we all deserve to have the best and most recent data available to us, in the fastest possible way. High quality analytics! That is the mission of UrbanDigs.com in the past, right now, and in the future.