Prices, which dropped about 25 percent in the second quarter of the year, compared with the same period in 2008, have not followed the upward swing. “My take-away from the uptick in activity is not that the market is turning, but that the market is not in free-fall anymore,” said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. “We still have a ways to go, but this is certainly good news.
Contract Signings Rise, and Deal-Watchers Exhale - NYTimes.com
I take this to mean that the NYC real estate market has dropped roughly 30% since the peak (on a per sq ft basis) and has roughly 10-15% further to fall, depending on your neighborhood and type of unit.
In other words, if you were looking at a $1M unit in the summer of 2007, it should now cost you about $700,000, and by the trough in Q4 2010 or Q1 2011 it should cost you about $625,000.
Note (for those who are interested): If not for massive government intervention to prop up real estate and for the massive funneling of wealth from taxpayers to Wall Street bonus pools, my NYC-specific forecast would be significantly more bearish than this, but this is my sense of the market reality as of today.
(via wiesen)