Looking ahead, however, some believe it is possible that the average slide from peak values could reach 40 percent by the end of 2010, with variation by neighborhood and market segment. That would put values back to levels last seen around 2002.
Others are more optimistic. “I’m not disagreeing with you that values are coming down,” said Pamela Liebman, the president of the Corcoran Group. But, she said, “there’s no way the Manhattan market is dropping to those levels that are being talked about. Certain apartments might, but as a whole it will not happen.”
Hall F. Willkie, the president of Brown Harris Stevens, said he, too, would be surprised by a decline that large.
“A lot of negative things would have to happen in the general economy,” he said. He is seeing sales prices 15 to 25 percent below those of last summer, with renters making up an ever-increasing percentage of buyers. And he saw a positive sign in the fact that, despite all of the bad economic news, sales volume is about half what it was this time last year.
Jonathan J. Miller, the president of Miller Samuel, a Manhattan research and appraisal company, estimates that contract prices have declined by about 25 percent since last summer.
Just how much further prices will dive may depend more on how soon and how generously banks resume lending than on the recovery of Wall Street or the end of the recession.
Ms. Herman said she expected the brunt of the pain to be borne within the next six months. Others expected the downward drift to last for a year to 18 months, until credit markets regain their equilibrium.
When will we know when the market has reached the bottom?
Frederick Peters, the president of Warburg Realty, noted that some deals his firm had brokered lately were nearing the lows being predicted by others. “Even if the New York market were to end up being 35 to 45 percent down,” he said, “to the degree we’re seeing deals done at 30 to 32 percent down anyway, it’s not very far away.”
Mr. Miller says sales activity needs to stabilize first. “You’re approaching bottom when you start to see sales activity stop declining and level off,” he said. “Pricing begins to push up when you have an extended period, like a year, when sales activity doesn’t decline anymore.”
One measure of just how anorectic sales have become is the bloated state of inventory.