The In-Between

Hi {{ First Name | Scooper }}! The market moves every day, but most coverage shows up monthly. This is your weekly read on what actually moved: one week of Manhattan and Brooklyn contracts, distilled to what matters.

Seven straight weeks of annual declines, the first such run since 2022: 216 contracts, down 24% year-over-year. The comparison is doing most of that work. Last year’s matching week logged 285 contracts, its high point for the season, after running 227 the week before. Manhattan’s own volume has now risen four weeks running, from 198 to 216, and the year sits 2.6% ahead of 2025.

New development fell 65%, its second-largest annual drop of 2026: 14 contracts, and a fifteenth consecutive weekly decline, the longest run since May 2022, with twelve of those fifteen weeks off more than 20%. Nothing in three and a half months suggests sponsors have finished adjusting to where resale is trading.

The weakness ran from the bottom up: under $1M fell 30% annually and $1M to $3M fell 25%. Those two segments are 78% of everything signed in the borough, so when they move the headline moves with them. The $5M to $15M range rose 24%, and no contracts were signed above $25M against two in the same week last year.

The top held nearly flat: $5M+ posted 24 contracts, down 4%, a single deal behind last year. Twenty-seven weeks after the pied-à-terre tax announcement, the segment trails 2025 by 3%. The week’s highest-priced contract was 255 East 77th Street PHD, asking $23.75M ($4,303 PSF), the last of the building’s five full-floor penthouses to enter contract.

The Upper East Side was the only submarket to gain: 56 contracts, up 6% annually and 24% from the prior week. Midtown fell 51%, Upper Manhattan 52%, Downtown 24%, the Upper West Side 13% and Financial District & BPC 10%. Upper Manhattan dropped 41% week-over-week after leading every submarket seven days earlier, which is the kind of reversal counts this small produce routinely.

Manhattan contracts fell 24% year-over-year last week.

Manhattan contract volume has risen four weeks in a row.

Both sentences describe the same data. Volume went 198, 206, 213, 216 over the last four weeks, climbing the whole way. The reason the first sentence exists is that last year’s matching week came in at 285, the strongest week of its season, 26% above the 227 that preceded it.

Hand a seller the first sentence, and they reprice. Hand them the second, and they hold. Nothing about the apartment changed in between.

Year-over-year is the number that gets printed because it travels well. One figure, one sign in front of it, no context required. What it hides is the half of the fraction nobody looks at. You are being told as much about last year as about this one, and almost nobody knows what last year was doing in that particular week.

So before acting on a percentage, ask two questions. What is the raw count, and what is it being measured against. If the comparison is an outlier, the percentage is a fact about 2025 wearing a 2026 costume.

None of this means the market is fine. New development down 65% on a fifteen-week streak is real, and the entry-level weakness underneath it is real. The point is narrower and more useful: the number that moved most this week is the one that tells you least about your apartment.

The question worth asking isn’t what the market did. It’s what your building did and what it was compared to. Let’s look at that.

Brooklyn nearly matched last year while Manhattan fell hard: 121 contracts, down 2% annually and up 30% from the prior week, with the year running 4% ahead of 2025. Two boroughs, the same seven days, a 22-point gap in the annual numbers.

Co-ops and multi-family houses were the only property types to grow: resale co-ops reached 37 contracts (+28%) and two- to four-family houses 39 (+30%), the latter nearly a third of the borough on its own. New development fell 68% to seven contracts and resale condos fell 16%.

Both ends rose while the middle gave way: under $500K climbed 71% and everything above $3M rose 133% combined, while $500K through $2M declined across every segment. Six contracts signed above $5M, against none in the same week last year.

Four of eight submarkets grew annually: South Brooklyn led at 55 contracts, up 28% and 45% of the borough by itself, with Fort Greene, Clinton Hill and Prospect Heights up 27%. Williamsburg and Greenpoint fell 67% with no new development signings at all, and Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill fell 38% on fewer resale co-op deals.

Large units carried the week: four-plus bedrooms reached 42 contracts (+24%) and three-bedrooms 29 (+4%), while two-bedrooms fell 23% and studios 57%. The most expensive deal was 39 Willow Place in Brooklyn Heights, a 25-foot-wide mid-1800s Greek Revival multi-family of 6,000 square feet, last asking $12.75M ($2,125 PSF).