This time of year, Mr. Brady is usually finishing up a few building projects so that his wealthy clients can move into their new homes by Memorial Day, but 2009 has been different; he doesn’t have a single Hamptons project in the works, and the other part of his business—selling interior design wares to other designers—is also scuffling along.

“We are trying to brainstorm on how to attract people to the store,” Mr. Brady said. Among the immediate plans is a redesign of the company Web site. If all else fails and business stays slow, Mr. Brady and his partner, Franco Biscardi, plan on giving up their lease in December and relocating down the street to a commercial space they own.

Much has been made in the last couple of weeks about the tanking Hamptons housing market—sales tumbled annually in the first quarter of 2009 by 49.8 percent, according to Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel, a slide similar to Manhattan’s—but that housing slump has tentacles: local retail and services, from concierges to restaurants to caterers to …

… Charities. Christopher Robbins is the vice president of Robbins Wolf, the high-end event-planning company that puts together the Hamptons Classic Horse Show; he first noticed a slowdown in the charity circuit last year, before the game-changing collapse of Lehman Brothers on Sept. 15.

“Last summer, around Memorial Day, the writing was on the wall,” Mr. Robbins said. “What we saw was that the locally based charities like the Southampton Hospital and the horse show did well, but the non-local charities didn’t end up getting the R.S.V.P. lists that they wanted."

Mr. Robbins expects more of the same this season. Indeed, the summer of 2009 may very well become a financial demarcation for the posher parts of the East End, as much an infamous time stamp as September 2008 has become for Manhattan.

Still, there will be enough weddings, birthdays and dinner parties to keep Mr. Robbins’ company busy. “I don’t think this summer is going to be terrible; wealthy people entertain and that is not going to stop,” he said. A dinner party might become a cocktail party; and charity organizations will scrimp where they can and lower ticket prices for their events.

“People are going to be discriminating with where they spend their disposable income,” William McGintee, East Hampton’s town supervisor, said. Mr. McGintee spent 25 years in the local police department before becoming supervisor six years ago, and although he still has faith in the timeless appeal of local beaches and their ability to draw summer crowds, he’s worried that some business might struggle. “My biggest concern is the area of restaurants, that people might make dinner at home and barbecue more often,” he said.

IN THE END, THE simple proximity of the East End to the very Manhattan that helped bring down its housing market may be what buoys it in the recession.

David Page and Barbara Shinn own a winery in Mattituck, one of many small hamlets in the North Fork. “The recession is driving people to us, and it seems weird to say this, but this economy seems to be a boon to our business,” Mr. Page said. The couple have been growing grapes since 1998 at Shinn Estate Vineyards, and according to Mr. Page, their overall business is up some 25 percent from last year.

Traffic at the farmhouse bed-and-breakfast, which is the big-ticket item on the vineyard—costing as much as $325 a night—is down, but wholesale bottle sales to wine and liquor stores are up nearly 30 percent, and sales in the tasting room are up by 25 percent.

They grow mostly Merlot-based blends on the 22 acres, and sell wines ranging in price from $15 a bottle to $43 a bottle. In a sign of the times, Mr. Page says that they are selling less to restaurants, who may be finding their diners are less receptive to their in-house bottle markups. According to him, the steady tasting-room crowds aren’t exclusive to just Shinn Estates.

“I think part of it is that people are doing a little soul-searching and realizing that they don’t need to be drinking $1,000 bottles from Bordeaux to impress their friends,” he said. “Instead, it might interest them to drink a $20 Merlot from a farmer they know.”

Andrew Zarrow, president of the charter jet company V1 Jets, has seen a change in the passengers on his company’s seaplane ride from Manhattan’s Skyport Marina off 23rd Street out to the Hamptons. Back in the glory days, the planes were filled with dime-a-dozen hedge-funders. Nowadays, the weekend warriors have been replaced, both by well-off homeowners and other nine-to-fivers who are actually making money and could still afford a $495 one-way ticket. 

And for every rider lost to the vagaries of a busted economy, Mr. Zarrow says that they pick up a cost-conscious traveler downgrading from more expensive modes of transport. Compared to a New York–East Hampton helicopter ride, which can cost considerably more, a ride in Mr. Zarrow’s amphibious airplane is a downright bargain. Mr. Zarrow is not planning on lowering prices this year.

There will be a summer in the Hamptons in 2009. The established beach and social scene will still draw its usual crowd, and Manhattan’s wealthier denizens will spend their money, even though they may not be quite as well-off as they were, say, last year. “I think it’s going to be a good summer,” Mr. McGintee, the East Hampton supervisor, said, “but I think it’s going to be a different summer.”

ohaydock@observer.com

“If I were a football player, I would be a quarterback,” Erin Andrews, ESPN’s blond bombshell of a sideline reporter, told the Daily Transom on Friday night, April 24.  “It’s the most important!”

We would have guessed tight end.

Sporting a blue dress and heels, Playboy's 2009 Sexiest Sportcaster of the Year–fresh off her opening-day coverage at the New York Mets' brand-spankin' new Citi Field, where she sampled the culinary offerings of rookie stadium concessionaire Danny Meyer ("I really enjoyed the barbeque sandwich," she said)–joined former New York Giants defensive end Michael Strahan and New York Jets offensive lineman D’Brickashaw Ferguson, among a smattering of entertainers and a few football heroes of the past, present, and future, at Seth Greenberg's posh party spot Espace in far west midtown for ESPN The Magazine’s sixth annual pre-NFL draft party.

The boozy event kicks off each year on the night before college football’s elite performers get snatched up by NFL teams and signed to multi-million-dollar contracts. (Top pick Matt Stafford wound up taking home a whopping $72 million!)

"It's a special occasion and you have to look good," said Minnesota Vikings running back Adrian Peterson, who, dressed in all black, nearly crushed the Daily Transom's writing hand with his death-grip shake. (We can see why he never fumbles!)

Both New York teams–the Giants and Jets–had important choices to make at Saturday's draft, which weighed heavily on players' minds at the pre-party.

Brandon Jacobs, the Giants' star fifth-year running back, hoped the team would pick a wide receiver to help replace the beleaguered Plaxico Burress, whom the team recently released amid weapons charges against the one-time Super Bowl hero. (A noted party hound, Mr. Burress did not attend the ESPN shindig.)

“I like the group of receivers that we have now,” the tank-like, 264-pound Mr. Jacobs diplomatically stated, “but if we can draft a receiver that could help us I hope we do that.” Giants General Manager Jerry Reese must have been listening because the team selected towering University of North Carolina wide-out Hakeem Nicks.

As for the Jets, who narrowly missed the playoffs last year and have a new head coach going into the season, Darrelle Revis, the team's star defensive back, wasn’t sure who he wanted his team to draft. “It’s tough,” he told the Daily Transom, “we need help at a lot of different positions.” (The Jets ended up picking University of Southern California quarterback Marc Sanchez in the first round.)

Toward the end of the evening, the Daily Transom caught up with actor Idris Elba, who played the ruthless drug lord Stringer Bell on HBO’s The Wire for five seasons. We asked him what position he thought that character would play on the gridiron. “I have no clue,” the dashing 36-year-old actor replied. Turns out, Mr. Elba is a Brit, and thus more of a football (read: soccer) fan; he roots for the London-based team Arsenal.

Mr. Elba had just finished up a six-episode arc on NBC’s The Office and is currently starring in the box-office blockbuster Obsessed alongside silverscreen sirens Beyoncé Knowles and Ali Larter. We wondered who Mr. Elba preferred working with, Office funnyman Steve Carell or the ubiquitous Beyoncé? “That’s a tough one,” Mr. Elba replied. “Steve is a funny, funny guy, but of course, Beyoncé is prettier.”

Holy cow, the Hamptons are affordable! Well, not really, but they are certainly more affordable this year than last, according to a new Douglas Elliman-Miller Samuel report (PDF). It’s abundantly clear that the collapse of the Wall Street economy is largely to blame here, and the wild spending out in the Hamptons, where moguls of all shapes, sizes and colors competed for prime real estate, is over, at least until the Manhattan-based economy picks up again.

In the Hamptons, the first-quarter average sales price dropped from $1,945,358 in 2008 to $1,313,735 in 2009; the $631,623 price chop represents an alarming 32.5 percent drop. The sleepier North Fork fared worse, with a 42.6 percent year-to-year drop in the average home price and a 13.6 decline in the median.

And what of the delicate symbiosis between Manhattan and the Hamptons? At first glance, Manhattan appears to be holding up better; in the first quarter of 2009, there were modest gains in both the average and median sales prices in Manhattan, which is surprising. But the numbers don’t really tell the entire story. Most of the price gains are attributable to the market in newly built condos, which included some dated data that skewed the overall numbers. In the more accurate and timely re-sale market, the first quarter median sales price in Manhattan fell 20.8 percent annually.

But enough of the bad news: After all, there are some winners here. As Rick Hoffman, the senior vice president in Corcoran’s East End sales office, acknowledged recently, it’s a renter’s market there this summer. The inventory of unsold homes on the market in the Hamptons and the North Fork skyrocketed to 2,289 this quarter, up 23.9 from 2008. Would-be sellers may very likely be inclined to rent their homes out for severely reduced prices. Enjoy the beach!

Consult our interactive map to monitor the race to the bottom.

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Have you seen an increase in people testing the market, looking to see what’s out there?
Yes, our agents are very, very busy. The buyers that are looking are real, but the sense of urgency isn’t there and buyers are educating themselves on the market right now. Then they know when they see something of value to them, and they know when to jump. Eventually, buyers that sit back and don’t move are going to regret it in a year. That’s the way it always is with this kind of market.

Are more houses on the market?
Yes. Inventory is up; not significantly, but it is increasing every month. There is this disconnect between buyers and sellers, and it’s very hard to get somebody who knows that their neighbor’s house sold for $3 million last year to admit that their house may be only worth $2.2 million in this market. When someone has already spent their money on their home and they have already decided that they can sell their house for $3 million, it’s a hard psychological adjustment to realize that they can really only sell it for $2.2 million.

There has been a lot of talk in Manhattan about the emergence of the first-time buyer. Is there an equivalent trend in the Hamptons?
Something that I think is very interesting in the first quarter of this year is that over 70 percent of all properties that sold were under $1 million, which is odd because typically our median home price has been well over $1 million. What you are seeing is that the low end is starting to recover, which is usually the case after the market softens. That’s happening now, with first-time buyers saying that they want a value property now. And, because there is less price negotiability in the lower market, they tend to move quicker in this market.
For some people, this is an opportunity, and I’m finally seeing some young blood coming back into the Hamptons. Prices had been rising so fast that the average young person living in Manhattan couldn’t really afford to buy property in the Hamptons. And now we are seeing some value properties, like small cottages and things like that, become more affordable.

How is the rental market shaping out?
Well, just like it being a buyer’s market, it is a renter’s market. Historically in the Hamptons, people rent for the season, from Memorial Day [to] Labor Day. This year we are seeing a shorter season for renting, people renting for just a month or two. And we are also seeing landlords being a little more realistic on their pricing. It’s not significant; you’re not going to go out and offer 50 cents on the dollar, but a little flexibility for a good, trustworthy tenant is certainly the norm. Historically, that was never the case.

Is the rental inventory up?
The rental market inventory has increased year to date. There are a lot of people with houses on the market who are figuring that they might as well rent their house as opposed to just letting it sit there. But, even so, the amount of rental transactions is down year to date. I anticipate, because our brokers are so busy with potential tenants right now, that we will have a major rental rush come May.

A lot of sales brokers here in the city have started working the rental market to survive the slow sales market. Is the same true out in the Hamptons?
We’ve actually always been busy in the rental market, simply because it’s good for brokerages to do business with both the people renting in the Hamptons and the landlords. Oftentimes, renters in the Hamptons turn into buyers, so it can help if you have an established relationship with as many people as possible. It’s a great source of business. Also, establishing relationships with landlords can bring in business, too, because they’ll have you as a contact if they ever decide to sell their property.

What are the broader effects of the housing slump out there? What does it mean for the leisure economy?
I think that the Hamptons became very glitzy in the last 15 years, and I think that there is a need for an adjustment. The draw to the Hamptons is really the beauty of the place, the rural feel of the Hamptons that we have tried to preserve over the years. And I think that this kind of adjustment in the economy won’t be the worst thing for the Hamptons. People have complained about the crowds in the past few years, so maybe that won’t be as bad this year. Maybe there won’t be these giant, glitzy parties; it might go back to a more relaxed beach-side escape.
 
What, if anything, did your office do to prepare for the downturn?
No one wanted to hear about the bubble bursting, but Corcoran is very good at tracking the markets, and I can sort of see what’s coming down the pipeline four or five months in advance. I think we predicted the market better than a lot of people, and we took some positive action to make the company run better. We looked for efficiencies in the company and consolidated some offices [where it] made sense. We had three offices in East Hampton, and that didn’t really make sense.

Have you reduced staff size at all?
Everyone has reduced staff a little bit. That is just part of the efficiency of having a consolidation. I think we’ve done the right thing as a company to prepare for this. I would like to see the market change soon, and I think that we are seeing some increase in activity.

What do you think needs to happen for a recovery in the real estate market?
I think that all we really need to get things moving is just some confidence in the market, a sense of urgency, because right now people just aren’t feeling like they have to jump on a property.

ohaydock@observer.com

It wasn't all that long ago that the North Brooklyn condo market was the great gentrifying hope for real estate developers, marketers and brokers (and buyers and some bloggers!) looking to expand the luxury market into the outer boroughs. Williamsburg developments like Douglaston’s the Edge and the Toll Brothers’ Northside Piers promised to bring Manhattan panache and Manhattan prices, and for a short time it was successful; in October of 2008 The Observer called North Brooklyn, which includes Williamsburg and Greenpoint, “The Brooklyn Brightspot,” in recognition of the fact that the enclave’s condo market was surging while the market in the rest of borough was already slipping.

Well, not anymore. The price march seems to have halted.

Schadenfreude, anyone? For some people, who view these river-near condos as nothing more than an imposition, the news is welcome. Ditto for bargain hunters. The struggles of these new developments have been well documented; with demand for amenity-laden new condominiums on the wane during the economic downturn, developers are slashing prices and converting some units into rentals in the hopes of turning a profit any way possible.

The overall picture for the Brooklyn condo market is similarly grim, with sales down 57.5 percent on the year and the year-to-year median sales price down 8.6 percent. (Stats are based on a new report from Miller Samuel and Prudential Douglas Elliman.)

You might assume that the collapse of Brooklyn’s condo market would spark resurgence in the traditional, smaller-scale housing mix in places like Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens and Park Slope. Even those established family neighborhoods are struggling. In Brownstone Brooklyn, which includes one- to three-family homes in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Clinton Hill, Downtown Brooklyn, Park Slope, Prospect Heights and other northwestern neighborhoods, the median sales price fell 9.4 percent annually and the number of sales 63.6 percent.

More detail per Brooklyn area in our interactive map below.

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To understand just how far rents have—and have not—fallen throughout Manhattan since the boom busted, we plucked four neighborhoods emblematic of the headier days and charted their average rents on different-sized apartments from the peak of the boom in September 2007 to what's likely the trough (or close to it) in March 2009. The statistics come from the Real Estate Group New York (PDF of the new March report here).

The four neighborhoods are The Financial District, which was once the next hot neighborhood as, like Harlem, it could be a refuge for renters who wanted to stay in Manhattan and maybe didn't have the cash to pay the record rents elsewhere; Greenwich Village, where everyone wants to rent always; and the Central Park–seperated Upper East Side and Upper West Side, where everyone ends up renting.

Of these four, the Financial District is the only one to have experienced a decline in rents for studios, one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms in both doorman and non-doorman buildings. Leading the FiDi retreat is the doorman studio market, where rents have fallen 18.2 percent in the 18 months since September 2007.

Upper East Side rents on doorman studios and one-bedroom apartments have dropped 9.1 and 7.8 percent, respectively, while rents on non-doorman studios, one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms have tanked 10.1 percent, 15.1 percent, and 15.5 percent, respectively.

Peruse our interactive map for more rental stats.

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Yes, the Mets have Johan Santana, the best pitcher in baseball, anchoring their staff. But behind the two-time Cy Young winner, the Mets’ rotation is shaky. Backing up Santana and Pelfrey are three gifted-but-unreliable pitchers: Oliver Perez, who looked like a particularly errant batting-practice pitcher in his last preseason start, against the Red Sox; John Maine, who is coming off an injury-shortened 2008 season; and Livan Hernandez, 34 years old and one year removed from a season in which he had a 6.05 earned run average. After Mets general manager Omar Minaya devoted most of the off-season to restructuring the Mets dismal bullpen, the rotation could end up being the thing that lets the Mets down.

In other words, if the Mets want to make the playoffs, Mike Pelfrey has to pitch like Jerry Koosman, who complimented staff ace Tom Seaver in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the nine seasons between 1968 and 1976, Jerry Koosman was one of the best pitchers in baseball, averaging slightly over 14 wins per season and helping the Mets reach the playoffs twice.  Koosman won two games in the 1969 World Series, pitching 8 and 2/3 innings of one-run baseball in Game 2 and closing out the series in Game 5 with a five-hit, three-run complete game. He wasn’t Tom Seaver, but the Amazin’ Mets wouldn’t have been so amazing without the workmanlike pitching from Koosman.

Mike Pelfrey stands 6 feet 7 inches tall and has one of the best sinking fastballs in the majors. Mixing in a decent changeup and an average curveball, Pelfrey doesn’t dominate games, but he is efficient when he is pitching well, forces a lot of groundball outs with his sinker and can pitch late into games. Unlike the other pitchers in the rotation, Pelfrey is an original Met, having been drafted in the first round by the Mets in the 2005 draft. Formerly a top prospect, he seemed to put it all together last year after struggling in limited major league appearances in 2006 and 2007.

In 2008, Pelfrey’s first full season in the majors, he went 13-11 with a 3.72 ERA in 200.2 innings. Those are fine numbers for a young pitcher, but he effectively pitched two different seasons last year.

From Opening Day to June 16th, Pelfrey started 13 games and had 3 wins, 6 losses and an era of 4.62. On Monday, June 16th, Pelfrey pitched poorly in the series opener against the Anaheim Angels, giving up six earned runs in six innings. He still managed to pick up the win, although he did not deserve it, and the Mets improved to 34-35 on the season. It was Willie Randolph’s last game as the Mets’ manager. Later that night, Randolph and pitching coach Rick Peterson were fired and replaced by Jerry Manuel and Dan Warthen, respectively.

Coincidence or not, both the Mets and Pelfrey thrived under the new leadership.

From June 16th on, the Mets went 55-38, although the season ended with Mets missing the playoffs on the last day of the season for the second year in a row. In that span Pelfrey pitched like a true number-two starter and did all he could to get the Mets into the postseason. In 19 starts after the Anaheim game, Pelfrey went 11-5 with a 3.35 earned run average, and pitched into the seventh inning in 12 of his starts. Immediately following the coup, Pelfrey pitched seven games without a loss and later, in August, pitched back-to-back complete games.

Whether it was getting rid of his mouthguard, or ditching his slider in favor of his curveball, or just a chemistry issue, Pelfrey pitched much, much better with Warthen as his pitching coach.

Now, the Mets are hoping he can reproduce his second-half form over the course of a full season, even though his workload jumped 48 innings from 2007 to 2008. Pelfrey had mixed results in spring training. In his final preseason tune up, he got shelled, giving up six runs in just 4 and 2/3 innings.

If the Mets are to make the playoffs for the first time since 2006, Pelfrey has to deliver. Around 200 innings, with an ERA around 3.50 and 14 wins should do it. He needs to be a great number-two starter. He needs to pitch a lot better than he pitched on Wednesday night.

“You could feel the tension in the brokerage community, because it was the first issuance of bad news after a huge run-up from 2003 to 2005,” Mr. Miller, president and CEO of appraiser Miller Samuel, said.

The quarterly housing reports wield an oddly powerful grip on the public’s perception of the market. Even though the data is partially dated by the time the reports are released, they are really the only documents that diagnose the state of the real estate market writ large.

During the housing boom, the reports were a broker’s best friend, and with the documentation of quarter after quarter after quarter of historic growth it’s not hard to see why. But now the bloom is off the rose, and analyzing the reports has become as joyless for brokerages as reading election polls was for McCain supporters last fall.

The numbers are what the numbers are.

Last week’s reports were the first to recount a post-Lehman Manhattan. Shocking absolutely no one, virtually all of the important sales metrics were moving in the same direction: down.

There were fewer sales, with Corcoran reporting a 52 percent annual decrease in quarterly closings from 2008 to 2009; and apartments that did sell went for far less than last year, with a 20.8 percent drop in the resale market’s median sales price, according to the Elliman report. And with few analysts predicting a hasty recovery, these housing reports are quickly turning into trimonthly bulletins of the industry’s interminable slog back to simply normal.

But if the reports lose favor among the brokerages, they are likely to pick up interest among consumers, who, for the first time in forever, are finding that the data tilts in their favor. The reports were viewed with more than a healthy bit of skepticism during the boom—or, at the very least, treated voyeuristically as financial pornography, for the vast majority of New Yorkers could never hope to afford what the reports dryly called the average-priced apartment.

“During the upside, I would chuckle because commentators on Curbed would call me part of the real estate industrial complex,” Mr. Miller said.

During the boom, it wasn’t just difficult for the data-heavy reports to get a fair hearing in public; judging from some of the comments from public forums, it was impossible. The reports, and the industry behind them, were viewed too much like cheerleading.

“Is there any source of accurate information regarding NYC real estate sales? Asking [real estate] firms about the state of the market is like asking Bernie Ebbers how WorldCom is doing,” wrote one anonymous Curbed commentator in response to the 2008 second-quarter reports.

“This ‘report’ is a joke,” wrote another. “It’s propaganda designed to increase buyer interest. There is no standard of accuracy or integrity whatsoever.”

Accusing the industry of Pravda-esque propaganda was easy when the markets shot ever upward, especially since three of the major reports are published by brokerages and much of the data compilation takes place behind a Vatican-like veil.

But the validity of the reports in the public’s eye has been proven now that, hey, they actually do show negative numbers. The industry, after all, has little to gain from touting misery.

According to industry analysts, more consumers are perusing Web listings, perhaps an indication that bad news is actually good for business. “Since January of this year, there has been an increase in traffic on our Web site,” Sofia Kim, the vice president of research at real estate Web site StreetEasy, said. “We are continually breaking our own records, which I think is due to a lot of latent demand out there.”

And what if brokers are indifferent to their firms’ reports? Is that so unbelievable? “Professionals want to see accurate information,” Gregory Heym, in-house author of Halstead Property and Brown Harris Stevens’ reports, said. “People have this notion that the reports are beneficial only if they are positive, but that’s simply not true because if a report is inaccurate, it doesn’t benefit anybody.”

Either way, the reports have leap-frogged in prominence since Barbara Corcoran started what was probably the first regular one, during the 1981 recession (the Corcoran Report was released every six months then). The reports, like houseguests and fish, have been around so long they’ve started to smell. But the public has warmed to the whiff, oddly enough, in these troubled times; others have, too, apparently. 

“I have gotten a lot more interest in the reports this time around,” PropertyShark founder Matthew Haines, who collaborates with the Corcoran Group, said. “Only it’s from the press.”

ohaydock@observer.com

Real estate research site StreetEasy set the first-quarter luxury market at apartments sold at $3.15 million and up, and reported that the number of sales in that range plummeted 45.3 percent year-over-year.

There were still 143 luxury sales in the quarter, according to StreetEasy, of which 36 were condo re-sales, 19 were co-op re-sales and 88 were new-development condo sales. Luxury sales decreased in virtually every neighborhood except the Upper East Side, where 53 of the 88 new-development sales took place and 20 of the 55 re-sales took place.  Although luxury re-sales declined on the year in the Upper East Side, new-development luxury sales increased there by 278.6 percent.

Overall, the re-sale market fared better than the new-development market, according to StreetEasy, with the median sales price in the co-op and condo luxury re-sale market falling 4.9 percent from the first quarter of 2008, while new-development luxury saw a spectacular year-over-year decline of 26.9 percent.

The dramatic price collapse in the new-development market is partially due to the fact that sales at high-priced addresses like The Plaza and 15 Central Park West are no longer skewing the data upward, but can also be explained by the tightening of the credit market and a widespread budget-conscious attitude shared by most consumers.

Still, the disparity between the year-to-year numbers is stark, and as much as they cap the end of the era of the luxury housing boom, they also mark the opening chapter in this sober-minded era, where fewer high-priced apartments trade hands and deals that do take place occur in familiar high-priced neighborhoods.

Either way, you get the picture and it is not pretty. (And not surprising: These are the first market reports to truly reflect a post-Lehman Manhattan.)

And it isn’t just that sales are down. There has also been a pronounced shift in the prototypical Manhattan buyer. As recently as six months ago, the Manhattan market was driven by the luxury market; not so anymore, say Corcoran CEO Pam Liebman, who says that first-time buyers have become a larger slice of the population. And this is changing which apartments get sold, and which don’t. “We are seeing a lot more activity on the lower end of the market, the starter market, with a lot of action on studios and one-bedroom apartments,” Ms. Liebman said.

For these first-time buyers, it’s nothing if not a very good time to buy in Manhattan. But for how long?

Manhattan’s inventory of unsold apartments on the market reached 10,445 in the first quarter, according to the Miller Samuel-Douglas Elliman report, which is a 34.3 percent spike from last year. There are a lot of apartments out there, and there aren’t a whole of buyers, simply put, with just 1,195 sales in the first quarter. Advantage: buyers.

Buyers wary of missing the market need not be, according to the experts. “I think that it is a multi-year process,” said Jonathan Miller, CEO of appraisal firm Miller Samuel and the author of the Douglas Elliman report. “We probably aren’t going to see heavy or significant sales volume for a few years.”

So it's not as if all that excess inventory is going to be gobbled in the spring or summer, even with the seasonal boost in sales activity. What to do if you're a first-time buyer? Buy now, while prices are low, or wait to see what happens and buy this time next year when prices are still likely to be low. There’s still a ton of stuff out there (around 10,500 apartment, in fact) and a quick recovery is unlikely.