Three reports released on Friday have revealed that after avoiding the area for almost a full year, homebuyers have started to gather back in Manhattan. The restoration of demand has helped bring some stability to the prices of the country’s most expensive market.

Greg Heym, who is an economist, and prepares market reports for two brokers in New York, said that house sales are back in “a big way”.

According to data released by Prudential Douglas Elliman, which is one of largest real estate brokers in New York, in the first 3 months of 2010, sales hit a 2,384 mark, which is almost twice the sales figures at the same time in
2009.

Jonathan Miller, CEO of Miller Samuel, which is an appraisal firm that produces Elliman's market report, while referring to the Elliman’s data, stated that when the sales reached 2,473 in the last quarter of 2009, a 3.6% drop was registered. But sales that quarter were “unusually robust”, he said.

Miller was quoted as saying, “There had never been a fourth quarter that ever grabbed a bigger share of all the sales for the year. Usually, the fourth is the slowest quarter”.

He concluded by saying that the first three months of 2010 managed to sustain that high rate, but did not quite carry it forward.