An apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows at 200 E. 20th Street, as shown in listing photos, where two units went into contract last week.
Photo: Douglas Elliman

While many New Yorkers had trouble getting out of bed last Wednesday, not everyone in the city was immobilized by the election results. Luxury real estate buyers, in fact, seem to have had a bit of a spring in their step: 39 Manhattan deals signed, more than any time since March, according to Donna Olshanwhich tracks Manhattan’s luxury real estate market.

“Across all my projects, we did close to $30 million in sales last week,” says Elena Sarkissian, associate broker at Douglas Elliman. These offers include four contracts at 108 Leonarda beautiful McKim, Mead & White conversion in Tribeca (where Nicole Kidman bought a place several years ago, and residents enjoy a 75-foot swimming pool and bathrooms finished in black Calacatta marble). The condos the buyers snapped up — all cash, of course — were asking between $3.99 million and $6.75 million. Actually, all of the transactions made by Sarkissian last week were in cash. Was it election anxiety, not interest rates, that held them back? “Regardless of where they stand politically, I think buyers were waiting to get through the election and the uncertainty of the election,” Sarkissian says. “The stock market has also been quite robust,” she added.

Jonathan Miller of valuation firm Miller Samuel, who recently reviewed 20 years of sales data in election years of Manhattan, Los Angeles, Miami and Suffolk County, says there is often a subtle dip in sales in the months leading up to an election and a subsequent spike post-election. “Sales drop 3 to 5 percent before the election, then catch up pretty much the day after the election for the next three months,” he says. And this happens regardless of whether the party projects or even wins – some buyers just seem to be scared of not knowing and reassured by a result. Any result.

But for buyers who have the luxury of not worrying about interest rates, whose hesitancy had less to do with 30-year mortgages than election jitters, last week proved liberating. In addition to the four offers at 108 Leonard (two of which were to buyers whose parents were paying), Sarkissian sold two other apartments. at 200 East 20th Street (wide white oak floors, floor to ceiling windows) in Gramercy for California pied-à-terre buyers. Another, at 201 East 74tha terracotta-clad Upper East Side tower sold to a suburban couple who wanted a pied-à-terre.

The top deals of the week, Olshan reported, were a four-bedroom penthouse at 247 West 12th Street, asking $15.9 million, which comes with a rooftop terrace and two registered parking spaces and a home $15 million Greek Revival style at Bancii Street 11. Could it all have been a fluke? Are the guys on Wall Street watching the post-election market rally and feeling good about their bonuses? Does anxiety buy among the one percent? “It’s been a really great week,” says Olshan. “But I’m not convinced it was a bell. We are in a very strange time.”