New York Real Estate Q4 2022: The Year Ended Not With A Bang, But With A Whimper

“This is the way the year ends; not with a bang, but a whimper,” to use a slightly skewed quote from T.S. Eliot. While the New York City real estate market fared better than many others across the country, prices and transaction volume both fell in comparison to 2021. The first four or five months of the year saw transactions on par with the preceding year, but then the market slowed to a whisper as the summer began. Summer doldrums, the pundits said. But it was something more.

Although 2022 came in like gangbusters, it fell victim to a potent brew of inflation, interest rate hikes, war, stock market volatility, and political animosity. Instead of record prices, we experienced record incidences of gun violence. Buyer caution reasserted itself through all price ranges as increasingly anxious sellers went through the five stages of real estate grief: