Since I've been blogging about prices and trends in New Haven compared with its suburbs, I was prompted to look at the shoreline statistics. Since we've been talking about the upper end of the city market, we checked sales of waterfront property since the beginning of the year. Taking Branford, Guilford, and Madison, a dozen homes on the water over $1 million (which we assumed meant all but an anomoly) sold in the first six months of 2010. They stayed on the market anywhere from one day to over 600 days, and none sold for the full listing price. The lowest listing to sales ratio was 62%, although most I calculated were in the 85% range, with only a couple selling at over 90% of the listed price. One was in Branford, three were in Guilford, and the rest were in Madison.
While this is an exceptionally low number of sales in that period of time, it does tend to confirm the idea expressed in earlier pieces that the City of New Haven is outperforming other high-end areas. The surprising thing about this particular comparison is that waterfront is the ultimate example of location, location, location. The most frequent comment on its primacy as an investment choice is that "they're not making any more of it". When even that theory fails to prompt sales, especially during a time when the traditional hoped-for investment bankers are doing well enough to buy waterfront summer homes, there's cause for real concern about the economy. Let's hope that the next quarter shows a different result.
