Manhattan Real Estate Finally Bounces Back to Normal

The Corcoran Group’s report showed a similar increase in sales. “A year-and-a-half after the pandemic began, it’s safe to say that New York City has its mojo back,” Pamela Liebman, Corcoran’s president and chief executive, said in a statement.

Buyers over the last few months gravitated toward co-ops, a housing type that had seemed to lose some favor in recent years. Co-ops accounted for 49 percent of all deals, versus 37 percent for existing condos, according to Corcoran. And in the frenzy of the post-pandemic market, downtown seems to have benefited at the expense of uptown, according to Compass, which reported that neighborhoods like Chelsea, SoHo and the East Village accounted for 31 percent of all deals.

For Elizabeth Stribling-Kivlan, a senior managing director at Compass, one of the spring’s most heartening developments was improvement in the financial district, a neighborhood that became a veritable ghost town during the pandemic with the emptying out of office buildings. Median prices there soared 33 percent in a year, the largest increase of any neighborhood, she said.

Yes, shuttered stores, sleepy business districts and gun violence make Manhattan feel different than before, she said. But with more workers expected to return to offices this fall and beyond, the borough should soon start to resemble its old self.

“People are feeling like they want to come back there, they want to see what will come out of this,” she said. “It’s a new era for us.”

Prices, though, may have a ways to go. The price per square foot for resale apartments, which is a useful indicator because it controls for the apartment size, Mr. Miller said, actually declined this spring over a year ago, to $1,408 from $1,461, or 3.6 percent.

“Prices are still not at parity with a year ago,” he said. The overall discount that buyers are paying on list prices is at 6.4 percent, which is better than 2020 but still higher than the decade average of 4.9 percent. “There still is a Covid discount out there,” Mr. Miller said, “but it’s easing.”