The second quarter market report from Brown Harris Stevens was released yesterday. It’s pretty thin on the Brooklyn data, which only the neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope covered. Compared to the skyrocketing prices in Manhattan, the Brooklyn numbers are relatively blah. Townhouse prices in Brooklyn’s two fanciest nabes edged up just one percent, according to the report, to $578 a foot; meanwhile, studios were up 4 percent, one-bedrooms rose 2% and two-bedrooms dipped 4 percent. The $578 number sounds very low to us and has be getting dragged down by the South Slope since all the good stuff in prime Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights is more in the range of $700 to $900 a foot. More interesting than the year-over-year number, however is how Q2 compared to more recent quarters. According to the BHS report, average per square foot for townhouses in these two areas spiked to over $700 in 3Q 2006 before falling to $634 in the fourth quarter and $568 in the first quarter of this year. The second quarter number was almost two percent higher than the first quarter. But what about all the neighborhoods that are left out of the report? We suspect that there was something of a bifurcation of the market in which neighborhoods that were perceived to have made it safely over the gentrification hump saw prices bid up faster than those with greater perceived risk. Overall, we would expect to see more bullish results for the borough as a whole than the Slope and Heights numbers, which makes sense if you think of these two areas as the safe, low-beta blue-chip stocks.