New York: Multifamily Sales See Best Quarter in Four Years

Rivergate | Largest Apartment Building Sale in NYC

Multifamily building sales in New York City totaled $2.5 billion in Q3 2011, the highest value seen in the past 15 years. While volume numbers are still off their peak values in 2006 and 2007, they have seen a substantial recovery from their recessionary lows – sales volume is up 70% from Q2 2011, 173% from Q3 2010 and a staggering 328% from the same quarter two years ago.

The recovery was not driven by a spike in number of closed transactions, but by a number of big deals that until then had been pretty rare since the onset of the financial crisis. The number of transactions in the multifamily sector was down 8% from Q2 2011, but up 16% from the same period of last year. The current number is representative of the activity in the multifamily sector in the past two years, when sales averaged 493 transactions per quarter.

With over $2 billion in sales, Manhattan was responsible for 80% of the city’s dollar volume. Brooklyn totaled $271 million and the Bronx $145 million.

The median sale price for an apartment building in New York was $1,170,000 while the price per unit was close to $125,000. The numbers varied greatly among the five boroughs, with the median sale price at $3,825,000 in Manhattan, $1,370,000 in the Bronx, and only $765,000 in Brooklyn.

Multifamily Sales Volume (in $ Billions)

The biggest deal of the quarter was UDR Inc.’s $443  M purchase for Rivergate, a 707-unit apartment building in East Midtown.  The Colorado-based REIT was on a buying spree this year, snapping up over $1.2 billion of  Manhattan real estate, according to the Wall Street Journal. Among the properties bought by UDR Inc. are 95 Wall Street, 120 West 21st Street, and 10 Hanover Square.

Note: For the purpose of this report we have analyzed multifamily and mixed-use properties of four or more units.