SOHO, NOHO, AND CENTRAL GREENWICH VILLAGE
If the West Village and Tribeca are king and queen of the downtown market, these neighborhoods are next in line to the throne. Preservationists may not like New York University’s aggressive expansion plans, but the dirty truth is that NYU’s presence helps anchor the area, ensuring a steady stream of newcomers to the housing market and parents willing to plunk down money for condos. Noho has singular appeal for buyers seeking something ever so slightly less polished than Soho, and as for the original loft neighborhood itself, “there are always people who want to live in Soho and only in Soho,” says Stacey Max, sales manager of Bellmarc’s downtown office. Super-luxe condo projects, including the much-discussed 40 Mercer and 40 Bond, have drawn a new set of those impossibly moneyed buyers. (The average price for a loft in the area jumped from $1.43 million in 2002 to $1.9 million in 2006.) Besides, says Prudential Douglas Elliman luxury broker Leonard Steinberg, “it never hurts to have Chanel down the block,” even if it means a crush of shoppers on Saturdays. Whether owners are finally protected from a sinking market will likely depend on the apartments themselves: “Loftlike” spaces—and many new buildings are branding themselves as such—are a poor substitute for genuinely great old industrial spaces. Real lofts with high ceilings and big windows will survive most any real-estate shakeout. Facsimiles will be a lot less desirable, and if you’ve overpaid for one, look out.

THE NEW GOLD COAST: WEST VILLAGE AND TRIBECA
A decade ago, few would have expected Park Avenue to have anything in common with the West Village or Tribeca. But these days, they’re pulling from the same moneyed demographic, says Prudential Douglas Elliman’s Leonard Steinberg. Credit the gracious housing stock, public schools prestigious enough that even the rich send their kids there (P.S. 234, P.S. 41, and P.S. 3 are consistently top-rated), and rabidly protective locals who fight any project that seems even slightly intrusive. Brokers say they can barely keep up with demand, especially in the West Village, which has managed to distance itself from the rest of the area despite all those cupcake-toting tourists. “The desire just keeps increasing,” says Sabrina Kleier of Gumley Haft Kleier, who went all the way out on that limb to declare it “recessionproof.” (Consider that if somehow property values were to fall in this area, even for a moment, a whole lot of people with imagined Village lives would flood in from second-tier neighborhoods like Murray Hill and Hell’s Kitchen and Yorkville. Prices would bounce back up in a heartbeat.) Tribeca is equally coveted, but inventory there is not as tight, thanks to a higher condo count (there are 30 new developments there, according to Streeteasy.com, and 9 in the West Village). Anything east of Church Street is less desirable, as well as south toward Chambers Street and the construction zone around ground zero, says Steinberg, so if you merely have a whole lot of money to spend rather than an immense lot, start there.

FINANCIAL DISTRICT
All those years we heard about the financial district’s residential future, and it didn’t happen—well, it’s finally here. There are twenty new developments and counting, and the longtime major complaints—no supermarket! No restaurants!—are being addressed, if slowly. A flood of new apartments has been marketed to Wall Streeters and families, and they appear to be strolling in, backed by an influx of expensive retailers like Hermès and Tiffany. But it’s a company town, driven by bonuses and financial-industry performance, and you know what that means: a real downturn in the stock market has the potential to stop all this change in its tracks. “There are a lot of units that have come on the market, and given the fact that the neighborhood’s still not established, [it] may experience a slowdown,” says Corcoran’s John Gasdaska, who’s had three clients who’ve postponed their search here. (They want to see what happens next.) The buildings that are doing well are at a slight discount (or offer more) relative to areas like Tribeca and the West Village, says downtown broker Leonard Steinberg, and those that aren’t are likely to lose buyers to those areas. As for cookie-cutter properties out of the main swim of the neighborhood, declares JC DeNiro’s Christopher Mathieson: “If you’re not in the right building in the right location, you have a problem.” Fortunately for buyers and sellers alike, the good spots are multiplying—around the subway stops and the Seaport are consistent favorites.

ESTABLISHED BROWNSTONE BROOKLYN
“A brownstone in Brooklyn Heights is almost $3 million, so even if you put down just 10 percent, you still need $300,000. That’s a lot of money,” says appraiser Scott Gallant, who adds that in general, recorded selling prices are no lower than last year’s. “Buyers who have that kind of money are usually financially stable,” having qualified for a giant mortgage. But brownstone Brooklyn’s real hedge comes from its mix. Park Slope and its ilk are home to a highly mixed demographic, with bankers next to teachers next to Safran Foers, notes Corcoran’s Deborah Rieders. That lends stability if, say, financial-industry bonuses go south next year. The locals are also stable in another way: Though plenty of residents cashed out during the recent run-up, many more have been here a while, which means not everyone bought at the top. In other Brooklyn hot spots, Gallant says, quite a few recent buyers could soon “wake up and say, What was I thinking?” (The wild card, of course, is Atlantic Yards. If 6,000 apartments are slammed into the neighborhood in a few years, they’ll play havoc with both the area’s makeup and its supply-and-demand equations.) The danger zones are likely to be areas that have glommed onto the cachet of these old reliables, where asking prices may be overreaching: the bottom edge of the Slope, say, or the fringe where Carroll Gardens fades into Red Hook. “I had a guy asking $700 per square foot in Sunset Park, and nothing happened for eighteen weeks. I said we should lower the price and he wouldn’t, and it’s still sitting there,” says one broker.