Cashing Out of New York City

THERE is a well-worn path between New York City and the surrounding suburbs. Over the years, many New Yorkers have made the move, looking for safer streets, better schools, bigger houses and more room to grow. Now another group is making the trek, and the reason is more squarely focused on money.

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Stu Woods and Carole Gass packing up at their co-op on the Upper West Side.

People are discovering that with Manhattan’s high apartment prices, they can cash out and get much more for their money outside the city, where the inventory is growing and the prices are falling. Some buyers, not quite ready for picket-fence lives, are even finding pockets of urbanism that didn’t exist outside the city a few years ago.

Stu Woods and Carole Gass are the kind of devoted New Yorkers who thought they would never leave Manhattan. In the 25 years they lived together in their two-bedroom Upper West Side apartment, they savored every stroll in Riverside Park, every shopping adventure to Fairway and every musical performance they could attend as a side benefit of Mr. Woods’s work as a studio musician.

Now they have sold their West 87th Street co-op for 9,000. It went within two hours at the first open house held by Jill Sloane, a broker at Halstead Property.

Mr. Woods and Ms. Gass used the proceeds to buy a three-bedroom ranch in Norwalk, Conn., for 0,000. They’re spending the holidays unpacking their Manhattan memories in their new home and celebrating the fact the they didn’t need a mortgage to buy it.

The widening gap between prices in Manhattan and the suburbs is what Ms. Gass said put this move into the “realm of possibility.”

“A couple of years ago, I think it wouldn’t have been an even swap,” she added. “We would have had to pay much more.”

Ms. Gass and Mr. Woods estimate that after taxes and train fare, they will have about ,000 more a month to spend than they did before.

Brokers agree that the deals are being found in the suburbs.

“You can negotiate better in the suburbs because their market is — at best — flat, and there’s a lot of inventory,” said Dottie Herman, the president of Prudential Douglas Elliman. “The prices of the city haven’t gone down. They keep going back up.”

New Yorkers are moving for reasons that are markedly different from those of 20 years ago. In 1990, when Jonathan Miller, the executive vice president and director of research of Radar Logic, a real estate research company, and his family moved to Connecticut from Manhattan, they were concerned about safety. “It wasn’t a move to save money,” he said.

Manhattan real estate prices are showing few signs of slipping. In fact, data from Prudential Douglas Elliman show that buyers spent an average of .37 million for a Manhattan apartment in the third quarter of 2007, a 6.3 percent increase compared with the same period last year.

Certain family-size apartments were more expensive than ever. Apartments with three or more bedrooms on the Upper West Side jumped by 46 percent to an average price of .5 million in the third quarter, according to Brown Harris Stevens.

The numbers stand in stark contrast to those of the suburban market. Figures released on Wednesday by Standard & Poor’s/Case-Schiller showed that prices for single-family homes in the New York City area dropped by 4.1 percent in October compared with October 2006.

Local real estate analysts see many signs that prices have dropped. Homes in Westchester and Connecticut are taking longer to sell, according to data tracked by the Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Danbury, Conn. Even in coveted suburbs like Darien, Conn., the number of houses under contract dropped by 23 percent in November compared with the year before, the Darien Board of Realtors said.

New Jersey sellers face even more problems: statewide, house prices have dropped by about 1 percent a month in the last several months, said Jeffrey Otteau, the president of the Otteau Appraisal Group in East Brunswick.

Buyers in Long Island’s most desirable suburbs are finding that they can get some of the best deals: Radar Logic’s figures show that median prices on the North Shore dropped by 7.7 percent in the third quarter compared with the same period last year.

Buyers are finding luxurious condos in the suburbs that they could not afford in Manhattan.

Jean Hassmer had been searching for an apartment similar to the one-bedroom co-op she owned on the Upper East Side, except that she wanted a doorman and slightly more space. But she couldn’t find anything in her budget — less than 0,000.

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