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Citi Habitats just released its latest Black & White Report (named so because, well, we don’t know) about Manhattan’s residential real-estate market, and — newsflash! — it seems apartments are expensive. That’s not news, of course, but there are some great nuggets in the report that get at The Way We Live Now. One revealing statistic: Only 7 percent of Manhattan renters have pets, compared to a national average of about 40 percent for dogs and 30 percent for cats. Another: The average renter is 30, which at first we found unsurprising until we thought of all those hanging on in sprawling rent-stabilized places uptown.
New Yorkers might be real-estate-obsessed, but when looking to buy an apartment, Citi Habitats found, customers are woefully ill-informed. People looking to buy three-bedroom apartments, the brokerage says, expected a price around $1.741 million; the actual average sale price for a three-bedroom in the latest survey period was $3.448 million. Everyone wants to live in Soho, which has the most expensive non-doorman rents for studios and two-bedrooms, and no one wants to live on the Upper East Side, which is the cheapest for two-bedrooms and the second cheapest for studios. Downtowners won’t cough up for an elevator, paying only a 4 percent premium for a studio-with-elevator in Soho. The Old Biddies on the Upper East and West Sides can’t do without, though, and will pay a full 17 and 20 percent more, respectively. But of course, there’s really only one stat that matters: $1.109 million. That’s the average price of a co-op in Manhattan. Aren’t the suburbs looking nice? —Duff McDonald
