Long Island Real Estate Market: A Mixed Bag of Mortgage Activity

The sky isn’t falling. We’ll start with that.

But local real estate market conditions remain mostly cloudy - for sellers at least, according to housing data released yesterday. Overall, though, Queens outperforms Long Island in terms of New York mortgage activity.

The median closing home price in Suffolk County rose 1.3 percent last month, compared with a year ago, to $395,000, according to the Multiple Listing Service of Long Island.

In Queens, the median price jumped 11 percent to $505,000. By contrast, in Nassau prices dropped 1 percent to $485,000, causing this to be more of a buyer’s market.

The latest data was more confirmation that the long run of double-digit price increases on Long Island had ended. But even with Nassau’s declines, no one should sound an alarm about the Island’s housing market, said Pearl Kamer, chief economist for the Long Island Association.

“These figures suggest that the Long Island housing market is far from imploding and that any future declines will be gradual,” she said.

The local market continues to benefit from the demand for housing among newly formed households and recent immigrants, Kamer said. “That will put a floor under home prices and prevent significant declines,” she said.

But the price slowdown has proved challenging for real estate agents and New York mortgage lenders.

“It’s been kind of like a roller coaster,” said Rosie West, an associate mortgage broker at RE/MAX Action in Freeport. “The sellers, or some of them, are still in last summer’s prices, whereas the buyers are in this season’s prices.”

Potential buyers are holding out, betting that prices will decline, she said. One big result is that the “really over-priced” homes are “coming into reality.”

As another measure of the market’s slowdown, the increase in residential housing inventory rose to 13,313 homes in Suffolk from 9,847 a year ago. In Nassau the number of houses on the market jumped to 9,457, from 6,786. In Queens, the number spiked to 9,170 from 7,024.

That higher inventory has increased the amount of time it would take to sell all the houses on the market. It would now take 12.9 months in Suffolk, compared with 9.4 a year ago. In Nassau, the figure rose to 11 months from 8.5. In Queens, the number rose to 12.5 months from 10.8.