Hey everyone, this is James at Yoreevo, New York's #1 commission rebate brokerage, with our September 2023 Manhattan Market Update. And if you remember last month, we thought the stat of the month was going to be inventory because a lot of new listings hit the market every September, and they did, but basically nothing unusual happened there. The more surprising data point was in contract activity. When we look at the number of contracts signed on a year-over-year basis, we are down 13%, and when we compare to normalized demand 2017 to 2019 average, we are down 8%. And so it seems to be that higher mortgage rates are just wearing buyers down and getting them to pause their search or just frankly putting buying out of reach for many. This is looking at demand compared to those normalized levels of demand, and you can see this is the first decline that we have seen since April. We had been up a couple percent, 5-10% for the last couple months and then a noticeable deceleration this month. This is looking at contract activity by price point, but what I thought was more interesting is to look at where the deceleration is happening. And if you see here, if you look at these numbers, you can see the overall market was down 10% on a year-over-year basis from down 3% down to 13%, but the bulk of that was happening in the $600,000 to $1 million and the $1-2 million price buckets. And I think that is due to, again, mortgage rates, and it's just these are normal buyers. These are people saving up for a one bedroom, a two-bedroom, and it's just the higher mortgage rates are frankly just pushing people out of the market. They just can't afford it. Particularly co-ops where you have to have very solid debt-to-income ratios to even be considered. When you look at the high end, as you go higher in price point, cash purchases are more frequent, so it's not surprising that higher mortgage rates aren't having as much of an impact there. And then in the under $600,000 range obviously higher mortgage rates are impacting the market there as well. I think there are two things going on there. One is a lot of pied-a-terre buyers target smaller apartments. And pied-a-terre buyers, while they are buying cheaper apartments, they are well off. And the other thing has to go has to do with inventory, which I'll get to in a second. So on inventory, remember we always see a lot of new listings at the market in September, and we saw that it was about 1,000 net new listings. But on a year-over-year basis, nothing really changed. We were down 4% in September versus 5% in August. So basically exactly what we expected to happen happened, nothing unusual. So basically the inventory story hasn't changed here in Manhattan. When we look at price point, again same thing here, that we've been seeing for the last couple months. The lower you go on price point, the less inventory there is. And I think this also might be supporting the under $600,000 market because when you have less inventory, buyers tend to act with more urgency. So they might just be pouncing on what inventory there is more quickly. And then when we look at mortgage rates, it's not a dramatic change, but I think it's just mortgage rates have hung out over 7% for a few months now, and I think it's just getting buyers to tap the brakes. Just like we saw last year when rates went to 5-6%, that was a little jarring, now over 7%, maybe a little jarring. And you can see rates have just kind of drifted up for the last few months, and it's just pushing buying out of reach for a lot of buyers. So going back to the contract activity chart, listings hit the market in September, but you can see here they don't go into contract until August. Basically, you have a lot of new listings hit the market in September. They get marketed and they go into contract in October. So next month, we're really going to be focused on the number of contract signed because it's a more substantial data point, it's a more relevant data point, so that's going to be the focus next month. But of course, in the meantime, if you're in the market and you're looking to save some money, we'd be happy to get you a commission rebate for up to 2% of the purchase price. We're happy to slice and dice this data however you like. And thanks for watching and we'll see you next month, bye.