The Double Meaning Of “Building Momentum”

New building starts are up:

Fueled largely by a housing boom, construction across the city is hitting a record level this year, with $20.8 billion worth of new apartment buildings, office towers and public projects under way, a new study has found.

The building boom’s estimated value is $2 billion more than last year’s, which was a record in itself, according to projections released yesterday by the New York Building Congress. The industry group predicts construction spending will top $21 billion next year.

“Given that World Trade Center construction activity won’t begin to peak until 2009 and that major development projects such as Atlantic Yards are slated to commence in that time frame as well, it is quite possible that the building boom could continue well into the next decade,” said Building Congress President Richard Anderson.

The industry group calculates that 30,000 units of new housing will be built annually this year through 2008, averaging $5 billion in construction costs each year.

. . . just in time for housing prices to start slumping:

Third-quarter market reports released today by the city’s top four real-estate companies show that apartment prices have dropped, while two of the surveys say prices have sunk below last year’s third-quarter numbers.

Following a record run of year-over-year double-digit price increases, the second half of 2006 appears to be a turning point moving in sympathy with the negative national housing market.

“My phone has nearly stopped ringing,” said one high-end broker who requested anonymity. “It’s a scary time in this business.”

A chilling report by Brown Harris Stevens shows the average sale price for cooperative apartments slid by 4 percent in the past 12 months to $1,003,945, while condos fell 6 percent to $1,196,930, compared to the third quarter of 2005.

Halstead Property notes that the average apartment price is $1,087,982, which is 4 percent less than a year ago, and 10 percent lower than the second quarter 2006.

Weighing particularly hard on the market is the average sales price for a Manhattan co-op, which has dropped 16.1 percent in just the last quarter, from $1.296 million to $1.088 million, according to figures by Prudential Douglas Elliman.

So is this whistling past the graveyard, as they say? Need more data:

If you have been waiting to buy a Manhattan apartment until after prices come tumbling down, you may have to wait a little longer.

Manhattan co-op and condominium prices sagged a bit last quarter, in the usually slow summer selling season, but by most measures they remained healthily above prices reported a year ago, according to a number of competing market reports released yesterday.

The conclusion of many of the brokerage firms releasing reports was that after a large advance in prices over the last few years, followed by several quarters of uncertainty, the market was essentially stable during the last quarter, despite the fact that apartments from a wave of new construction are coming on the market and there was continuing uncertainty about the direction of interest rates and the economy.

The Times then goes on to repeat the same numbers as the Post . . .