Weekly activity down

Noah Rosenblatt

Talking Manhattan on UrbanDigs.com
Staff member

John Walkup

Talking Manhattan on UrbanDigs.com
I'll play one of the weak retail sales excuse cards: Monday, Jan 18 was MLK Day, so reallllly it was a 4-day week, so reallllly would expect CS to be down 20% just from that ;)
 

David Goldsmith

All Powerful Moderator
Staff member
Take a look here. I went to Monthly Contract activity, all years, and then photoshopped DEC and JAN so you see them next to each other. Hmm, looks like 2015/2016 was last time - https://www.urbandigs.com/marketwide-charts/monthly-contract-activity/

View attachment 160
Yes Q4 2015 saw 2858 signed contracts and January 2016 only 609 indicated the "down market" had arrived.
Q4 2020 was 2662 (7% lower than 2015) so I'm not sure it was an indication the market was "back" (especially since you have to take into account the time dislocation of demand in 2020 due to 3 months of shutdown earlier in the year). Point being we saw what followed after the last time January signed were below December.
 

Noah Rosenblatt

Talking Manhattan on UrbanDigs.com
Staff member
Yes Q4 2015 saw 2858 signed contracts and January 2016 only 609 indicated the "down market" had arrived.
Q4 2020 was 2662 (7% lower than 2015) so I'm not sure it was an indication the market was "back" (especially since you have to take into account the time dislocation of demand in 2020 due to 3 months of shutdown earlier in the year). Point being we saw what followed after the last time January signed were below December.
hm, yeah, I see where you going with this. It could also be the anti-seasonal nature of 2020, where the demand cycle happened to peak in Dec..guess we will know soon enough
 

David Goldsmith

All Powerful Moderator
Staff member
I believe we are largely on the same page, I just think a lot of the exuberance lately has been using straw man arguments. The market is doing better than when there was a lockdown earlier in the year? The market is doing better than 2019 which was a horrible year? Neither of those seem terribly probative to me. How about comparisons to other times where we know prices were increasing? And then you still have to adjust for the relative supply vs demand then vs now (and include all the shadow inventory).

BTW what percentage discount did Jason Thomas say it would take to clear the New Dev inventory?
 

Noah Rosenblatt

Talking Manhattan on UrbanDigs.com
Staff member
I think another 10-15% on top of what is offered now.

Yeah I hear you. 2020 was just a complete one-off year. An anomaly. Not quite a black swan event, but close to it. Im curious to see if 2021 brings normalcy back or if we are still in extreme swing mode until the market finds its equilibrium from the steep fall and then steep recovery in liquidity
 

Mark

Member
I've seen many broad, negative conclusions about the entire NYC housing market use vanity metrics that aren't probative. I've also seen many broad, positive conclusion about other housing markets use vanity metrics while not zooming out enough with data to provide meaningful context.

The NYC market is too fragmented with too many disparate stakeholders to have a singularly conclusive story.

There are enough positive signals about the segment I care about to be excited about they city's future and frustrated with the blunt "NYC is dead" conclusion that's found some footing. I'm exuberant!
 
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