BROOKLYN — Kings and Queens counties both saw rising prices and falling inventory, while the pace of sales remained strong, according to a report released Thursday on 2016 fourth quarter sales from Douglas Elliman.
Brooklyn hit a record for median sales price, increasing more than 15 percent over the same time the year before, to $750,000.
That’s in contrast to Manhattan where the median price took a hit in the fourth quarter, dropping nearly 9 percent from the previous year to $1.05 million.
“Things are still very active in Brooklyn,” said Douglas Elliman’s Sarah Burke.
But don’t expect another year of double-digit price growth.
“The pricing increases are starting to stabilize. We’re not going to see dramatic increases,” she said.
While Brooklyn’s inventory fell sharply, down 31 to a record low of 2,232 properties, the number of sales completed in the fourth quarter spiked from the same time a year ago, up 22 percent to 2,582.
It marked the fastest pace of sales in the eight years Elliman has been tracking it.
“Sales are burning up the supply,” said Jonathan Miller, the real estate expert who authored the Elliman report.
Burke believes sales would have been higher if not for the “tremendous gap” between the inventory people want and what’s on the market.
“There’s just not enough inventory in the categories people want right now: two-, three-, four-bedrooms. People are looking for homes they can stay in for a considerable amount of time,” Burke said. “There are some one-bedroom buyers, don’t get me wrong. But they’re also asking, ‘Can I live here for a while?’”
Areas like Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Kensington, Ditmas and Midwood — which Burke called “suburbia in urbia” — were seeing a lot of interest, she added.
In Queens, prices also rose while inventory fell.
The median was up 6 percent to $498,000, while the average hit a record $573,455, up nearly 10 percent from the same time a year before.
The borough's listing inventory fell 22 percent from the previous year to 3,668.
Astoria, Jackson Heights and Ridgewood were attracting a lot of attention from families who might otherwise have looked at Brooklyn, Burke noted.
“You can equate Queens to where Brooklyn was 10 to 12 years ago,” she said.
For rentals, the northwest region of Queens — which includes Long Island City and Astoria and is the only section of the borough the rental report covers — the median price was $2,850 a month, up nearly 12 percent.
Meanwhile, rents in Brooklyn have been slipping.
The median rent for the borough in December was $2,700 a month, down nearly 4 percent compared to the same period the year before, the Elliman report found.
And the share of new rental transactions with concessions — like a free month or an owner paying the brokers’ fee — continued to rise: 13.7 percent of new leases had concessions, compared with 6.5 percent the year before.
In Manhattan, the share of new leases with concessions also continued its upward trend, hitting a new record for the third month in a row. More than 26 percent of new transactions were offering some sort of deal, the Elliman report found.
Overall, Manhattan’s median rent inched up about 1 percent to $3,388 a month.
But the market was bifurcated, with rents rising in the bottom 60 percent of the market while rents declined in the top 40 percent.
