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The Sienna Research Institute conducts a monthly New Yorker Consumer Poll every month. This month showed that more New Yorkers planned to purchase homes than immediately following the credit crunch in the fall of 2008:

>4.7% of consumers in the state plan to buy a home this year, compared with just 3.4% in April and 3% in May 2009. As good as it is, the latest reading is still far shy of the three-year high set in June 2007, when 5.6% of New Yorkers said they wanted to buy. Conversely, in January 2009, at the lowest ebb in the last three years, a mere 2.2% said they would buy a home.

In fact the improvement in consumer attitudes toward housing are far more optimistic than overall confidence compared to 3 years ago.

New York consumer buying plans for homes are down 0.6% from the same period in 2007 while the New York Consumer Confidence Index is down 15.1% over the same period.

Apparently New Yorkers are more confident about their housing future than their overall lives.