WOW. THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG

Given what was going on with the financial system back then, if you’d told me in 2008 that in five years New York-area housing markets would be setting new records, I’d have told you that you were nuts. I’d have been wrong:

Home prices in Brooklyn, New York’s most populous borough, surged to a record as low interest rates and rising rents across the city swelled demand for homeownership amid a dwindling supply of properties for sale.

The median price of condominiums, co-ops and one- to three-family homes that sold in the second quarter was $550,000, up 15 percent from a year earlier and the highest in more than a decade of record keeping, New York-based appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate said in a report today. The inventory of listings fell 19 percent to 4,704, the lowest for a second quarter since Miller Samuel began tracking the data in 2008, said Jonathan Miller, the firm’s president.

“You choke off supply, you have a slowly improving economy, and prices rise,” Miller said. “And then you compound it by widening your source of demand, when one of your competitors — Manhattan — is experiencing the same inventory problem.” [Emph. added]

Kind of remarkable. . . .