Luxury Home Prices Hit Record Highs in New York’s Affluent Hamptons

Luxury home prices have reached a new high in The Hamptons. GETTY IMAGES/EYEEM

Already considered to be among the most expensive locales in the U.S., luxury home prices in the tony Hamptons—an affluent summertime escape found at the very tip of Long Island, New York—reached a new high in the first quarter, according to reports from some of the exclusive enclave’s brokerages Thursday.

The luxury segment of the market encompasses the highest 10% of all home sales, which meant properties that sold for above $5.6 million in the first quarter, according to Douglas Elliman’s data.

The firm found that the median luxury sale price reached more than $8.53 million in the first quarter, a jump of almost 11% from the same time last year and up a sizable 27% from the fourth quarter of last year.

Luxury prices “reached record highs as market-wide sales fell to long-term lows, constrained by lack of listing inventory,” wrote Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of the real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel and author of the report.

Just 18 big-ticket homes changed hands between January and the end of March, fewer than half as many as the 40 properties that closed across the East End at the same time in 2022, the report showed.

Across all price points of the Hamptons market, meanwhile, the median sale price fell “after steadily rising to record-high levels for the last four years,” according to a separate report Thursday from Brown Harris Stevens.

The metric slumped 7.7% annually to $1.8 million, and while lower than last year it still ranked as the second-highest first quarter prices recorded to date, the report said.

Serious sellers, according to the report, are coming to terms with the fact that “pandemic pricing” is over and are adjusting their listing prices accordingly.

At the same time, the number of transactions declined for the second year in a row—“clearly signaling a slowdown in the Hamptons real estate market,” wrote Philip V. O’Connell, the executive managing director of Brown Harris Stevens of the Hamptons.

“Traditionally, fewer sales and lower prices would indicate a shift from a seller’s market to a buyer’s market, but this is not the case in the Hamptons today,” he said. “The third required element of a buyer’s market—a surplus of available homes—is absent. In fact, the inventory level of homes on the East End is still at near record-low numbers and is the major local factor impacting the rate of home sales today.”

Via Mansion Global