Hey everyone! It's James at Yoreevo, New York's number one commission rebate brokerage, with our February 2026 Manhattan Market Update.

It was a surprisingly weak month. It wasn't a weak month, but it was a surprisingly weak month. When we look at the number of contracts signed, they were flattish both compared to normalized levels of demand and last year. That is in spite of mortgage rates continuing to decline. We'll get to those numbers in a second, but lower mortgage rates are not getting buyers off the sidelines. It's not really spurring much interest. I can tell you that just based on my day-to-day conversations. I'm not really talking about mortgage rates, which is surprising. So, lower mortgage rates are not getting buyers off the sidelines. Interestingly, you can see the high end just keeps on chugging. The high end is where you see the least amount of financing. So, in the price points where you see more financing, they actually underperformed the overall market. Mortgage rates are not really much of a factor in today's market. I mean, sure, we'll take it, but it's not getting people to buy. You can see here that we were, with the exception of November, up 15% to 25% versus normalized levels of demand, and now we're flattish. So, it could be a blip. February isn't a particularly busy month for contracts signed. It's a busy month for people looking and getting deals that will later be signed. We'll see how this plays out in March and April, but there's not really anything to get too excited about on the demand side. On the supply side, I say, "Where's the bottom?" because we just continue to see material declines in the number of listings on the market. We were down 8% at the end of February, and obviously, if you have fewer things to sell, you're going to sell fewer of them. But this hasn't really changed. We were seeing similar levels of declines the last few months. So, this is not a driver of the sudden pullback in demand, but you can see declines across the board at all price points. Inventory is tight everywhere. When we look at mortgage rates, it wasn't a huge decline. They were down 10 to 15 bps during the month, but we did slip just below 6%. The 30-year fixed-rate national average was 5.98% this week. So, I'm surprised I'm just not seeing headlines about mortgage rates being below 6%. But I can tell you buyers aren't talking about it. It's not a conversation we're having. It seems like lower rates are something that's nice to have, but they're not getting people to enter the market and think about buying or exiting the market because financing is just getting too expensive. It's just an afterthought for buyers out there. So, we are in the thick of the spring selling season. If you're in the market, of course, we'd be happy to help and get you a commission rebate of up to 1.75% on any property in New York City. You can reach out to us at info@yoreevo.com. We'd be happy to help. Thank you for watching, and we will see you next month. Bye.