A new analysis of price movements in Battery Park City apartments — both rentals and condominiums — finds that valuations have begun to tick upward, but have still not fully recovered from a recent softening. The Battery Park City Report for the second quarter of 2018, recently issued by Platinum Properties, a brokerage firm headquartered in the Financial District, finds that, in Battery Park City’s rental market, more apartments are being leased compared with the start of the year and the same period one year ago, and that fewer of these units are offering discounts.
The average rent in Battery Park City is now $5,121 per month, the report finds, which comes to approximately $66 per square foot. This represents an increase of 3.06 percent over the same period one year ago. The total number of apartments rented jumped by 92 percent compared to the second quarter of 2017, increasing from 102 units to 196.
Studios and one-bedroom apartments saw the biggest increases from one year earlier, jumping 5.54 percent (to $3,201) and 8.63 percent (to $3,927) respectively. Prices remained comparatively soft for two- and three-bedroom apartments, declining 7.92 percent (to $6,973) and 17.95 (to $15,619) year-over-year. But both of these categories rebounded slightly from the first quarter of this year.
For condominium apartments, the Platinum Properties report finds that the average owner-occupied unit in Battery Park City now sells for $1.57 million (which translates to $1,401 per square foot), an increase of 24.24 percent from the first quarter of this year, but still 4.9 percent lower than the same period one year ago.
The typical studio apartment in the neighborhood now sells for $610,000, while one-bedroom units are going for $931,361, on average. For one-bedrooms condominiums, this represents a price increase of 13.68 percent from the second quarter of 2017.
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For larger condominium units, the pictures is more ambiguous. Two-bedroom apartments sold for an average price of $1.8 million in the second quarter of this year, which is a 20.4 percent increase from the first quarter, but 5.02 percent drop from one year earlier. And three-bedroom units took a beating, falling to an average price of $2.64 million, a drop of 34.86 percent from the first quarter of this year (when the average price was $4.05 million) and 16 percent from the same period one year earlier (when the average price was $3.14 million). But these dramatic price fluctuations may be distorted by the fact that relatively few three-bedroom units turn over in Battery Park City during a given quarter: A total of six were sold in the last three months, while four changed hands in the first quarter of this year, and nine were bought in the second quarter of 2017.
The total number of condominiums sold in Battery Park City between March 1 and June 30 was 34 units, a significant jump from the 27 that were bought in the first quarter, but a large falloff from the total of 48 sales in the second quarter of 2017. Among owner-occupied apartments that sold, there was an average discount of 2.31 percent from the asking price, which was smaller than the same figures for the first three months of this years (7.37 percent) and the second quarter of of 2017 (2.63 percent).
To download the Battery Park City Report for the second quarter of 2018 by Platinum Properties, click here.