Country Guides Country Guide: New York

Date Published:

24/06/2008

New York. Let’s cut to the chase. It’s simply the most romantic city in the world, isn’t it? That’s a statement not a question, by the way. Yes, it’s noisy, over-crowded, dirty and traffic-congested – but it’s also vibrant, life-affirming and… awesome.

By Gordon Miller

The Property Market

For starters you’ve got more world-famous landmarks per square mile than anywhere else all crowded on to the relatively small island of Manhattan (approximately 14 miles long by 3 miles wide). The Statue of Liberty, The Empire State Building, The Chrysler Building, The Rockerfeller Centre, Wall Street, Radio City Music Hall, The Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park… enough already! But all that’s for tourists. What about living in the Big Apple?

For starters, let’s get the geography straight. Manhattan is just one of the five boroughs that constitute New York City (the state is also called New York). The other four boroughs are the Bronx, Queens, Staten Island and Brooklyn. New York is among the most expensive cities for real estate in the world. GlobalPropertyGuide.com ranked New York fifth dearest in the world (behind Monaco, London, Hong Kong and Moscow). The average price of a property in New York, it found, is $14,898 per m2. Like the rest of the USA, however, New York has not been immune to the housing downturn of 2009.

Andrew Hawkins, Head of International at Chesterton Humberts, said: 'Despite New York’s reputation as one of the most expensive and exclusive cities in the world, the worldwide credit crunch and rising unemployment in the financial sector has meant a slowdown in the demand for property. The New York property market was able to hold off recession in the first instance but job cuts have now impacted on housing prices and property sales. In the Greater New York area, prices have fallen across the board, and the general decline in Manhattan is reported to be around 5 per cent.'