Manhattan Apartment Prices Up 200 Percent; In '97, $225,000 Got You a One-Bedroom

How far Manhattan’s come. A new report says that the average sales price for a condo or a co-op in

How far Manhattan’s come. A new report says that the average sales price for a condo or a co-op in the borough has increased more than 200 percent in the last 10 years. The average price in 1997 was $430,927, and, in 2006, it was $1,295,445, according to the report from appraisal firm Miller Samuel and brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman (DOUG).

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The titanic upswings in housing prices shouldn’t surprise any halfway sentient New Yorker. But some stats in the report did startle The Real Estate.

The median sales price for a Manhattan co-op apparently jumped 244.4 percent from 1997 through 2006, traveling from what now seems a very affordable $196,000 to the decidedly less so $675,000. The median price for Manhattan studio co-ops was under $100,000; now, it’s nearly three times that.

The prices-per-square-foot for Manhattan apartments in the late 1990’s seemed especially quaint. An Upper East Side co-op sold for an average of $315 a foot 10 years ago, and for $988 a foot now. Along Central Park West a decade back, co-ops went for an average of $524 a foot; now, $1,548. Chelsea condos in 1997 sold for an average of $319 a foot–just about one-third of what condos there sell for now. In Harlem and East Harlem, the price per foot increased 340 percent, from $145 a foot to $639.

And, despite such price increases, the number of Manhattan home sales stayed steady year to year over the last decade, going from a valley of 7,316 in 1997 to a peak of 9,522 in 1999.

Miller Samuel CEO Jonathan Miller assured The Real Estate on Monday that a link to the full report would be up on his firm’s Web site by early Tuesday.

UPDATE: The link is up (PDF).

– Tom Acitelli

Manhattan Apartment Prices Up 200 Percent;  In '97, $225,000 Got You a One-Bedroom