Manhattan Seasonality Arrives

Posted by urbandigs

Mon Nov 22nd, 2010 01:35 PM

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A: Expect Active & Pending to fall for the next 4-6 weeks or so, until we get into 2011. Also, we should expect Off-Market trends to rise, as listings are removed from the active market and "freshened up" for the upcoming bonus season. Lets take a look at this seasonality in the charts.

Here we see new ACTIVEs by month in bar chart form. The methodology for this is simply:

- All Brand New Listings
- All Listings Updated to an ACTIVE 'state' from a prior OFF-MARKET' state'
- Only unique addresses
- Counts the Most Recent broker updated 'state' as of the last day of the month

So, we can count the number of New Listings that hit the Manhattan marketplace by month, and view how that month compared to the same period 1 year and 2 years earlier:



Here we see that August, November & December are the seasonally slowest months for new Active listings to come to market.

At the same time, listings are being REMOVED from Active inventory to take a 'breather' of sorts after not selling for "X "months. This is captured by viewing the cumulative total of listings changed to OFF-MARKET, from a prior Active 'state':


*we will fix the legend blocking the chart in upper right

So here you see how the trend of taking listings OFF the active marketplace rises as you near the end of the year, and falls as you get into the active season - as you would expect, sellers control their inventory in conjunction with the relative pace of demand.

When the market gets real crazy, like after Lehman, sellers tend to take inventory off the market until some perceived level of stabilization occurs. Interesting stuff.