Manhattan Apartment Prices Up 200 Percent; In '97, $225,000 Got You a One-Bedroom

How far Manhattan's come. A new report says that the average sales price for a condo or a co-op in the borough has increased more than 200 percent in the last 10 years. The average price in 1997 was $430,927, and, in 2006, it was $1,295,445, according to the report from appraisal firm Miller Samuel and brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman.

The titanic upswings in housing prices shouldn't surprise any halfway sentient New Yorker. But some stats in the report did startle The Real Estate.

The median sales price for a Manhattan co-op apparently jumped 244.4 percent from 1997 through 2006, traveling from what now seems a very affordable $196,000 to the decidedly less so $675,000. The median price for Manhattan studio co-ops was under $100,000; now, it's nearly three times that.

The prices-per-square-foot for Manhattan apartments in the late 1990's seemed especially quaint. An Upper East Side co-op sold for an average of $315 a foot 10 years ago, and for $988 a foot now. Along Central Park West a decade back, co-ops went for an average of $524 a foot; now, $1,548. Chelsea condos in 1997 sold for an average of $319 a foot--just about one-third of what condos there sell for now. In Harlem and East Harlem, the price per foot increased 340 percent, from $145 a foot to $639.

And, despite such price increases, the number of Manhattan home sales stayed steady year to year over the last decade, going from a valley of 7,316 in 1997 to a peak of 9,522 in 1999.

Miller Samuel CEO Jonathan Miller assured The Real Estate on Monday that a link to the full report would be up on his firm's Web site by early Tuesday.

UPDATE: The link is up (PDF). - Tom Acitelli