High-End N.Y. Real Estate Cools Along With Stocks

The New York Sun reports:

The Manhattan apartment market, long immune to national trends, could be cooled by the latest credit crunch and its effect on global markets, experts say.

With hedge funds collapsing and a stock market increasingly prone to wild swings, Wall Street bonuses, a major driver of the booming local housing market, could take a hit, especially when compared with the record awards at the end of 2006.

Taken with a hike in mortgage rates from wary lenders and a tightening of lending standards, the seemingly endless demand for Manhattan apartments could drop, putting an end to the rising prices that have characterized the local market for much of the past decade.

"I've been doing this 20 years — I've never seen anything change this fast," a vice chairman for the brokerage firm Prudential Douglas Elliman who works with the high-end residential market

Next years bonuses,in February,will tell the coming story of New York City real estate.