Real-estate brokerage Brown Harris Stevens released another rosy report on Manhattan’s residential market today. Prudential Douglas Elliman also reported record average prices in the Manhattan market. (Full Brown Harris Report | AP Story)

Elliman said the average Manhattan apartment price, which includes cooperatives and condominiums, jumped 17.6% in the fourth quarter to a record $1,439,909 from the year-ago period, while Brown Harris reported a 34% increase to $1,430,514, another record. The Brown Harris Stevens report shows that the median sale price of a Manhattan apartment jumped from $725,000 in the fourth quarter of 2006 to $828,000 last quarter, a rise of 14.2%. (See a post on Brown Harris Stevens’s third quarter report)

While the fourth-quarter report doesn’t detail home sales, Brown Harris chief economist, Gregory J. Heym, says that apartment sales fell 1% from 2,557 in Q4 2006 to 2,531 in Q4 2007, while the average amount of time homes stayed on the market dropped from 97 days to 84 days. “Things are selling faster,” he says.

An architectural rendering of 15 CPW.

While the “rate of growth” has slowed, Manhattan’s market continues to be propped by a high number of luxury-home sales and by interest from foreign buyers, Mr. Heym says. He notes that the number of homes sold at prices over $10 million has tripled from a year ago and that the fourth quarter’s average apartment prices are “somewhat inflated by the high-end of the market.”

Also lifting the average price tag paid for a Manhattan apartment last quarter was a significant amount of new construction, with closings on new condos at The Plaza and 15 Central Park West -– at an average price of over $6.95 million -– accounting for 7% of all condo sales, he says.

But should conditions on Wall Street grow dimmer, that could certainly affect Manhattan’s residential market, he says. “I think the concern is whether Wall Street layoffs will grow larger than what was announced and whether that will slow down the local economy,” he says.

Meanwhile, New York’s regional market is showing weakness. A recent article from the New York Times notes that prices for single-family homes in the New York metropolitan area fell by 4.1% in October 2007 from October 2006. Homes in Westchester and Connecticut are staying on the market longer. Home prices have dropped 1% a month the last few months in New Jersey and median prices on the North Shore of Long Island decreased 7.7% in the third quarter from the third quarter of 2006.

Readers: Do you think Manhattan will show strength or cracks in 2008? — Lauren Baier Kim