The 14-room Park Avenue apartment of the late socialite Brooke Astor -- which Barron's highlighted in that earlier story after its price had been cut from $46 million to $34 million -- is now down to $29 million and probably has to be cut further.
But even with dramatic reductions like that, the inventory of unsold luxury housing is ballooning. Streeteasy.com, a Website that pulls together listings and insights from a variety of brokers and buyers, now shows 795 New York apartments offered for $5 million or more, up from 518 a year ago.
Detailed data on that top tier of sales are hard to come by, but the price trends are thought to be similar to those in the mainstream luxury market, defined as the top 10% of home sales. Using that yardstick, the median sales price of a Manhattan luxury apartment topped out at about $5 million in the first quarter of last year -- well after the national housing market came unglued -- and then fell nearly 20% by the end of the third quarter, according to Miller Samuel, a real-estate appraisal firm.
New York City 2010
