Real estate on Manhattan sold at mind-blowing prices

By Margarita Snegireva. In spite of the fact that some real estate sellers call U.S. housing market a nightmare, Manhattan was a real dream because of the constantly increasing demand as supply remained tight, thus making the average price incredibly high.

Photo: Real estate on Manhattan sold at mind-blowing prices

Real estate on Manhattan sold at mind-blowing prices

Peter Cooper Village—Stuyvesant Town is a sprawling private residential development on the East Side of Manhattan. One of the most successful of postwar private housing communities, Stuyvesant Town was planned in 1943. Its first tenants, two World War II veterans and their families, moved into the first completed building on August 1, 1947. Stuyvesant Town is a collection of red brick apartment buildings with typical housing project-style architecture, stretching from First Avenue to Avenue C, between 14th and 20th Streets. It covers about 80 acres of land. Stuyvesant Town has 8,757 apartments and with its sister development Peter Cooper Village they have a combined 110 buildings, 11,250 apartments, and over 25,000 residents.

Today, Manhattan offers a wide array of public and private housing options. There were 798,144 housing units in Manhattan as of the 2000 Census, at an average density of 34,756.7/sq mi (13,421.8/km²). Only 20.3% of Manhattan residents lived in owner-occupied housing, the second-lowest rate of all counties in the nation, behind The Bronx.

Two swanky condominium projects, The Plaza and 15 Central Park West, helped propel the average price of a Manhattan apartment to a record $1,439,909, up 17.6 percent from a year earlier and 5.1 percent, from the third quarter, according to Prudential Douglas Elliman Manhattan Market Overview, Reuters reports.

"Foreign demand has been a big part of the story," said Jonathan Miller, director of research at Radar Logic and author of Prudential's quarterly overview reports, but foreigners are not permitted to buy cooperatives.

"In a lot of new development we've seen significant activity from domestic purchasers as well," Miller added.

The average price per square foot of $1,180 set a record, up 18.2 percent from a year earlier and 3.1 percent from the prior quarter, according to the Prudential report.