Hamptons luxury home prices continue to break records

Bloomberg — Luxury home prices in the Hamptons, New York, rose to record highs in the first quarter.

Sales closed in the top 10% of the market averaging $8.54 million, 11% more than a year ago, according to appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate. The median price of luxury homes in Long Island’s coastal cities also broke a record, at $16.1 million, a 33% increase driven by a few particularly large purchases.

Demand for luxury homes is “extremely strong,” said Todd Burgard, CEO of Elliman on Long Island. “Right now we have more buyers in that market than inventory. So when something reasonably priced comes out to the luxury market, we get a lot of interest.”

However, luxury transactions in the quarter fell to 18 versus 40 a year earlier. Across all price ranges, Hamptons deals are down 57% to 171 deals. It was the second-lowest total since the companies began tracking territory sales in 2005, trailing only the 145 closing deals in the first quarter of 2009.

“Mortgage rates, economic uncertainty, are we going into a recession?” said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel. “All of these variables going around are part of the combination of why overall sales activity is down.”

A shortage of menus has also hampered shopping in the Hamptons, a stretch of Long Island’s South Fork that includes Amagansett, Montauk, and Southampton. The stock has shown signs of improvement lately, but not as quickly as real estate agents and home hunters would like.

There were 894 homes on the market at the end of the quarter, up 33% from a year earlier, but still 54% fewer than there were in the first quarter of 2020, before the pandemic. Although many buyers are still looking, they are frustrated with what is available.

“If we had a normal spring, when we usually have a large number of homes coming to market, we would immediately see those sales numbers go up,” Burgard said.

For all sales in the quarter, average price decreased 2.9% from a year earlier, to $1.36 million. However, large luxury purchases pushed the average price to a record $3.08 million, up 18% from early 2022.

Among these large transactions was the off-market purchase of 32 Windmill Lane for US$77.8 million. It was part of a beachfront complex in East Hampton that sold in two separate deals that closed in January for a total of $91.5 million.

So did 51 West End Road in East Hampton, which Elliman’s agents Kyle Rosko and Marcy Braun sold in January for $35 million. The 1.5-acre (0.61 ha) waterfront property near Georgica Pond features a five-bedroom home built in 1926. The sale came after two cuts from the $60 million asking price set at the end of 2021.

Read more at Bloomberg.com