The following is from the Banker & Tradesman wriiten by Scott Van Voorhis:
The downtown condo market, invincible no more
The downtown condo market looked all but invincible for so long.
No longer.
For my Commercial Interests column in this week’s B&T, I took a look at a survey of 13 new Boston condo projects by the PrimeTime Urban Report found just one sale per month.
The results, especially for someone who has been inclined to shrug off the problems facing the downtown condo market, were sobering.
The report out suggests that sales of luxury units remain stuck at last year’s anemic levels, and are even slipping back further.
Or to be exact, 1.03 sales per month through the first half of 2009, down from a not exactly banner 1.2 sales a month last year.
Either way, it’s not likely enough to clear out the hundreds of unsold luxury units out there.
At this pace, it would take 100 months to sell off the remaining 558 units in these projects, which include the Clarendon, 45 Province Street, Harrison Lofts and FP3.
I’ll do the math for you – that’s more than eight years.
More troubling yet, this lackluster performance has come amid growing signs the overall real estate market has bottomed out and may soon be on the upswing.
Not, then, what I was expecting to see.
You’ve got to hand it to this real estate downturn. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, it gets stranger still.
