Manhattan’s property market in post-lockdown rebound

When Australian physician Weng Yee Chin and her husband came to buy a Manhattan apartment in 2019 before moving from Hong Kong, they were “traumatised” by the experience and rented instead. Armed with pandemic savings, they started looking again at the start of the year. They may have been enthused by the lower prices — but that didn’t make the process easy, exactly.

“I feel that there was a lot of value, compared to 2019,” says Chin. The couple made three different offers at the start of 2021. But all of them failed.

“There were a lot of bargains to be had if you were lucky and if you moved on it at the right time and [were] willing to compromise,” she says. But competition was hotting up. By the time they found the apartment they bought on the Upper East Side, the market had clearly shifted, and they were forced to increase their budget. In the end, the pair paid $3.7m for a three-bedroom condo on the 30th floor of a building on East 90th Street, with plenty of room for their two daughters and two dogs.

But Chin is “keeping a very close eye” on the market these days, she says, wondering: “how much did I overpay?”

For the past few months, the Manhattan property market has seen a rebound that few expected so quickly given how deserted the island felt at the start of the pandemic. Property portal StreetEasy reported 4,997 sales in the second quarter of 2021, the highest since its records started in 2010.

“Since April, I don’t think we’ve ever done this many transactions in such a tight period of time,” says Jeff Adler, a broker with Douglas Elliman.

Demand in the rental sector is up, too. “July [2021] was when we really started to see rents start to return to almost pre-pandemic levels for several neighbourhoods,” says Nancy Wu, an economist at StreetEasy.

Olivia Anne, who declined to give her surname, and her partner, decamped to upstate New York for much of the pandemic, letting the lease on their one-bedroom apartment in Chelsea lapse in February. When the couple looked to return to the city this year, they were hoping to find a bargain. In the summer, they put their apartment search on hold until the rental market cools down.

“It was just under $4,000 [per month] that we were paying in the end. Now I think the one-bedroom in [our old] building is over $5,000,” she says.

Douglas Elliman broker Marie Espinal says that some of her customers are renters opting to buy rather than pay such high rents.

In the sales market, Wu says the current rebound is a clear contrast from what was happening pre-pandemic, when prices were falling month after month since 2018. According to Douglas Elliman, the median property price in Manhattan in the second quarter of 2021 was $1.13m, the highest level in eight quarters, and up 5 per cent on the first quarter.

Wu cites the city’s reopening, low mortgage rates, and a greater certainty about where people will be working from as the “perfect storm” fuelling this…