Buyer Confidence - Portent or Blip? - NYTimes.com MORE than 200 people showed up for an open house at a town house in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, last month, and the crowd, filled with stroller-pushing parents and young children, was so lively that an ice cream truck pulled up to join the happening. The house, at 214 Kane Street, went into contract quickly, after the owners sifted through 14 offers, nearly all of them above the $1.875 million asking price. In the West Village a few weeks earlier, more than 300 people lined up on a Sunday afternoon to see a sunny fifth-floor walk-up with two bedrooms, 15-foot ceilings and a $997,500 price tag. Eleven offers later, it went into contract about 20 percent above the list price. Even though the most recent market reports show Manhattan real estate prices holding steady, as they have for more than two years, other signs indicate that the New York City market may finally be willing to stop flirting with recovery and commit wholeheartedly. To start with, open house traffic for some properties has reached levels not seen even at the height of the market in 2007 and 2008. But buyers haven't just decided to start looking at properties again; they're actually buying. Bidding wars have become more common. On the development front as well, sponsors say the pace of sales has picked up with the warmer weather. The number of new building permits for residential units, which dwindled to a trickle in 2010, has seen an impressive increase. For the first two months of 2010, no residential building permits were issued. For the same period in 2011, permits were issued for 52 units. This January and February, the number increased nearly 800 percent, to 457 units. Developers also say that banks that had steered clear of construction loans for residential buildings have started to loosen their purse strings, although they are still unlikely to approve loans for condo projects with more than 100 units. "If you were not cognizant of the underlying state of the American economy and you lived in New York - in this bird cage we call home - you would think everything is just rosy," said Jeffrey E. Levine, the chairman of Douglaston Development. But given that the federal debt looms large and higher interest rates are around the corner, he said, "there's no way of knowing if the recovery is as broad or as deep as we'd like it to be." Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, warned that buyer exuberance could be short-lived. With Wall Street bonuses much smaller than in years past, the surge in buying is not likely to last long, he said. "Also, once we hit summer, we're going to see a lot more distressed properties hitting the market," he said. Even though Manhattan is not a hotbed of foreclosure, the world around us will be, so there'll be more negativity in the air. Despite all this, many brokers are optimistic about a busy spring season. Having grown accustomed to staging open houses for four or five people at best, they are savoring the wave of enthusiasm. The new normal for open house traffic is about 20 visitors, and it seems to extend to all apartment sizes. Of course, age-old maxims still hold, so spaces encumbered by less-than-ideal locations or inflated prices, or places that don't show well, remain unlikely to generate much interest. Judith Furgiuele, a vice president of Brown Harris Stevens, said she was stunned late last month when an open house for a $1.625 million three-bedroom listing on the Upper West Side drew about 150 people, even though it had been "priced very well because the owners had already bought something." Several other apartments in the building were holding open houses that day, so she suspects there was some overflow traffic. "But at one point," she said, "as we were trying to handle all these people, I said I thought it was the only listing in Manhattan, and one buyer said to me, "It kind of is." " The number of new listings coming to market in Manhattan has indeed dropped. For the first three months of 2012, the Corcoran Group counted 5,349 new listings, nearly 16 percent fewer than the 6,406 new listings over the same period last year. Much of that drop may be ascribed to the construction slowdown in recent years. Corcoran estimates that the number of new units dropped 47 percent, to 2,700, in the first quarter of this year, from 5,056 for the same period in 2011. Brokers say that certain neighborhoods and types of homes seem to be experiencing the shrinking supply more severely.