Manhattan luxury-home prices in a slide amid weak investor appetite

New York

MANHATTAN'S luxury-home market is losing its lustre. The median price for the borough's most-expensive homes fell to US$3.59 million in October, down 2.2 per cent from a year earlier, according to an index by StreetEasy measuring resales in the top 20 per cent of the market. Prices have been dropping every month since February, when they reached their highest point on record, a median of US$3.72 million, an analysis of data from the listings website shows.

"There has been a continuous decline for eight months and I'm comfortable calling that a peak," Alan Lightfeldt, a data scientist at StreetEasy, said in an interview. "The downward trend in that decline hasn't abated, and we haven't seen it wavering in any way."