In fact, I’d bet that a handful of these pricey homes & condos have skewed the numbers WAY too high for both purchase price and rent price.

This is why AVERAGES suck for these kind of analyses. Median prices would reflect some kind of reality.

Remember, if Bill Gates walks into the room, everybody’s AVERAGE worth goes up by millions.

would love your feedback or anyone else with good insight. my wife and i are considering a 2bd/2bat brand new condo in downtown brooklyn. 10 yr tax abatement with $1000 a month service charges. it’s $700K – i have $200K for downpayment. unsure if we’ll stay in ny more than 4 years though. building is 50% occupied. buy or keep renting?

I can speak to Brooklyn best: $1 million is the absolute baseline for houses in the half of the borough closest to the city. You’d think it would be cheaper down by Coney Island…you’d be wrong. Take last week: there was a $7.1 million sale of a small two-family house in Gravesend. GRAVESEND! It takes almost an hour to get to midtown from there. But people pay a mint to stay in their home neighborhoods…(Staten Island is the same way…I’ve lost count of the number of multi-million $$ McMansion sales I hear about from there — which frankly kind of boggles my mind. No offense, SI people)

The Queens prices include those big Forest Hills houses, and the Bronx figures all the nice homes in Riverdale, and up near Westchester. And of course, all those millions of renters in all the boroughs all live in apartment buildings which are owned by someone…and when they sell, they’re not selling cheap.