OUTSIDE a condominium tower on Prospect Avenue one recent Sunday, Robert Young was pulling hard to uproot an open-house sign he had planted earlier.
“I really had to pound it in,” said Mr. Young, an agent at Weichert Realtors, as he tugged at the metal stakes. “At first nobody was showing up, and I saw the wind was knocking the sign flat.” Once he secured it, Mr. Young said happily, several condominium shoppers did appear.
“I think we’re going to sell this puppy,” he added. “It’s got a nice price, mortgage rates are still low and it appears that people are finally recognizing this is a good time to buy.”
Of course that was just one agent wearing his happy face. But there are others marketing condos in northern New Jersey counties — Essex, Hudson and Morris, as well as Bergen — who say traffic has been surprisingly decent at open houses this spring and who see the market picture as improving, if not necessarily pulsating with good health.
Brian Morgenweck, a broker with the Power Realty Group in Hackensack, said that on average in Bergen County condos were spending 117 days on the market, which is under four months.
As of April 20, he said, 1,797 condominiums were listed in Bergen County, versus a high of 1,945 last July, shortly after the expiration of the federal tax credit for home buyers.
“So the inventory of available units is shrinking,” said Mr. Morgenweck, who is the founder of his agency, “and even more importantly sellers are finally coming around to serious reality with their prices.”
Because of the way the market is churning, said the New Jersey market analyst Jeffrey G. Otteau, it is impossible to pinpoint the average or median asking price of condos on the market in Bergen County.
But he did compute the median price for the 192 condos for sale in Hackensack: $222,000.
In two other Bergen communities with substantial numbers of condos for sale — Cliffside Park, with 160, and Edgewater, with 168 — Mr. Otteau said the median prices were $390,000 and $535,000, respectively.
In those three towns, condo prices are running well below those for single-family houses, and in Edgewater, where the median house price is $1.299 million, condos cost less than half that.
“To the extent that condos are holding their own in this market,” said Mr. Otteau, the president of the Otteau Valuation Group in New Brunswick, “the fact that they are less expensive than single-family homes has to be considered a driving factor.”
But to talk of any market’s holding its own, he added, is not to say it is healthy.
At the current rate of sales in Bergen County, for example, it would take 13.3 months for all the units now on the market to be sold — if no other condos were added to the inventory of homes for sale. In Hudson County, which had 1,781 condos on the market in April, it would take 11.8 months to sell them all.
Certain local markets are defying the norm, and performing better than their counties:
Hoboken in Hudson County has 6.2 months’ supply of condos on the market, a healthy number in the eyes of statisticians. Mahwah in Bergen has 6.1 months’ supply.
In Mahwah so far this year 14 or 15 condos have sold each month. The same number sold in Hackensack, but it also had 192 condos remaining unsold after 30 days; Mahwah’s unsold quantity was 90.
In some cases where condos are selling relatively well compared with single-family houses, Mr. Otteau said, the trend may simply reflect how poor the market is for houses. After all, in his company’s latest report to subscribing real estate professionals, he referred to the overall housing market as having a “faint pulse.”
West Orange in Essex County has 99 condos for sale, an inventory that would take an estimated 10.2 months to sell. The average unit is spending 112 days on the market. That compares with an unsold inventory of 279 single-family houses, or 12.4 months’ supply, with houses spending an average of 109 days on the market.
Ellen Oxfeld, a Coldwell Banker agent, said the condo market in West Orange had picked up over the last three months. She cited agency statistics indicating that the absorption rate for condos — meaning how long it takes them to sell — had shrunk to 6.2 months in March, from 8.3 months in February and 14.5 months in January.
“All markets are local,” she said. “And right now, condos are doing fairly well here.”
A month ago Ms. Oxfeld listed a three-bedroom town house condo at Normandie Estates for $379,000. Built in 1998, it last sold in 2003, for $432,000.
In Morristown, too, condos are selling faster than single-family houses. There is a 12.8-month supply of condos on the market, and a 14-month supply of houses. Condos spend an average of 81 days on the market; houses spend 115 days.
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