The Luxury Property Blog looks at Manhattan, where the luxury real estate market has created a new median record for apartments in Manhattan despite falling sales and growing inventory

Much is being made of the latest news that median apartment prices have reached a new record in Manhattan. But what does this actually mean? A selection of news articles covering the Manhattan real estate market. In no particular order.

Sales are down, but the average price of an apartment in Manhattan is currently just over $1.6 million according to Curbed’s “State O’ the Market Report.

Summer doldrums be damned, it’s friggin’ market report day, people! We’re talking Q2 this time around, and the results should surprise no one. Just like the first quarter of 2008, prices are at record levels but sales are down from this time last year. Miller Samuel’s report for Elliman has the average Manhattan sales price at $1,669,729, a 25.2% increase over the prior year quarter result of $1,333,316.

The IHT blog, “Raising the Roof,” suggests that “Trumplings are busy pitching New York to foreign buyers,” after the International Herald Tribune reported that Donald Trump’s SoHo hotel-condo project will be offering the penthouses exclusively to buyers from the United Arab Emirates.

With the Trump Organization’s continued growth throughout the Middle East, we thought it was only fitting to bring sales of our unique Trump SoHo penthouses to the U.A.E. Trump said in an e-mailed statement.

Peter Comitini offers the latest Corcoran group market trends report which has been revamped and is now being produced in collaboration with Property Shark.

New development closings typically lag behind the market by one-to-two years and are therefore a poor barometer of what happens when a seller lists the home she has lived in for ten years on today’s market. Moreover, brand new, highly-amenitized luxury properties are much more likely to sell at a higher price point than the average property competing on the open market. In this report, therefore, we examine re-sales in isolation while our colleagues at Corcoran Sunshine analyze new development property sales.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the median price of a Manhattan apartment hit $979,000, up from $795,000 in 2007, but also states inventory is up. Strong luxury sales and faltering studio sales had the perverse effect of pushing the median to a new record.

While luxury sales remained very strong, the reports showed slowing sales and weakening prices for studios and one-bedroom apartments, where buyers are extremely sensitive to tighter lending requirements and larger down payments now being demanded by mortgage lenders,” writes Josh Barbanel in the New York Times.

Put simply, the only property selling at the moment is the very high-end luxury real estate - expect a median price correction when the rest of the market eventually comes back to life.