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A ‘startling’ number of Manhattan sellers yanked listings off the market last week

By Brick Underground  | March 25, 2020 - 11:30AM
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The number of listings taken off the market during the week of March 16th, 2020, was 448, compared to 119 in the third week of March last year.

 

Pamela Drew/Flickr

Real estate sellers face plummeting sales activity with New Yorkers under instructions to stay in their homes and so they are pulling their listings off the market in big numbers.

Even prior to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s March 22 ban on non-essential business, the early effects of the coronavirus pandemic can be felt. A new report from UrbanDigs, a Manhattan real estate analytics platform, looks at the impact on new listings on the Manhattan market, new contracts signed, and listings taken off the market as of last week.

The analysis compares the week beginning March 16th, 2020 to the week of March 18th 2019 (both are the third full week of March). Sources include the RLS from REBNY, Brooklyn MLS, ACRIS, and proprietary data.

The number of listings taken off the market during the week of March 16th, 2020, was 448, compared to 119 in the third week of March last year, a “startling increase” of 276 percent, according to the report.

There were 109 new contracts signed, compared to 214 during the week of March 18th, 2019, a drop of 49 percent. Listings new to the market fell 70 percent, from 459 to 98.

Real estate listing sites have frozen their days on market counters in an effort to support sellers and remove the stigma of stale listings and some real estate activity is going virtual, however Noah Rosenblatt, founder and CEO of UrbanDigs, expects the numbers to look even grimmer, with more listings removed from the market, in the weeks to come. 

“When we came into this coronavirus situation, the market had a supply problem. We had around 6,600 units at a time when listings typically pour into the marketplace. When we get out of this, I genuinely wonder where supply levels come back to and if it’s much lower than where we were before,” Rosenblatt says.

 

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