Sure, NYC metro is up 10%, but the median price ($780k) is still far from LA/Orange County (an eye-watering $1.2 M median) and San Jose/Sunnyvale at $1.4 M.
Cleveland and Buffalo are at ~$250k median though...and they are technically "coastal" cities :)
This is YoY Q1 for NYC. I’d be curious whether this holds for the first half of the year. Likely no. Bay Area prices are also expected to fall due to market volatility.
I think the reason for this is pretty intuitive: more expensive (NYC/Bay Area) homes are purchased by high income people. And higher incomes are more affected by the stock market because high comps are composed of higher % stock. Someone making 200k might have 20% stock. Someone making 600k might have 50% stock. So a 10% drop in stock market costs the first person 2% of their comp and the second person 5% of their comp.
1. Stock is mostly a tech thing, which is a smaller percentage of NYC home buyers.
2. Real estate is a safe haven asset to put capital into. In uncertain markets some buyers will choose real estate over stock or other more risky investments. NYC real estate is a highly valued asset globally.
3. Real estate prices in prime global locations (London, Dubai, NYC) are determined more by global liquidity than by local wages.
4. Recessions often impact real estate prices less than stock prices. 2007 was an outlier because of how many defaults occurred in real estate. In general the mortgages today are much stronger than before.
5. If mortgage rates decrease then that would have upwards pressure on housing valuations.
EDIT: Prices might come down, but I wouldn't expect fantastic bargains in NYC.
While the bigger investment banks pay mostly stock at the higher comp levels, most everyone depends on salary and, or course, bonus. In the highly paid buy side trading firms, bonus is your salary or multiples. No doubt people buy into the stock market with that.
So your analysis about stock market performance and the housing market isn't completely off, when it comes to NYC. You just need to compare the Bay Area and Mag 7 type performance with NYC and S&P performance.
The job market, too. It's confusing, it seems like there's not as much selling or buying as in boom times, because of uncertainty (at least anecdotally). The median price is meaningless if the number of sales is down.
unsustainable. and should be unconscionable. almost every pressing social problem can be traced back to the lack of housing supply (of course, some traces are looser than others)
What is actually unconscionable is that when the nature and consequences of inflationary money are exposed, the discussion immediately gets shut down. If the people were to understand what real money is, and it is not the national currency, then people would hold it instead of holding the national currency. Hint: real money is things like GLD/VTC/BTC/PAXG/XMR. Secondly, people also are instructed by the consumerist system to spend as much as they earn, effectively to not save or invest. Controlling the narrative about money is how the rich control the poor.
Surely it's not so simple when New York City is building more housing supply that essentially any other American city (and has the best public transit system in the nation)
NYC is unlike most housing markets in that for a lot of people, an international pied-a-terre in NYC is a sign of luxury and wealth, whereas no one really gives a crap if you have a second home in Seattle or Chicago or Boston.
In the US the only other markets that operate like that are probably LA, Miami, maybe Honolulu.
Interesting given NYC's population still hasn't recovered from its early 2020 high [0], rent and home prices keep rising (and fast). There are many reasons discussed here: pied-a-terre's, foreign investors, lack of new construction and inventory at affordable levels contributing to low vacancy [1] but still hard to fathom at a naive supply and demand level, shouldn't ~300k less people and several new residential buildings finishing construction in the past few years contribute to lower not higher prices? [2]
I think the headline is pretty misleading and meaningless. The 10% median increase across the city is pretty useless as a statistic. For instance the median by neighborhood is widely different! the median in Manhattan as a whole is double the median of the city see the map in the article to realize that NYC market is a collection of sub-markets with their own dynamics and type of property mix the price per sqft is widely different between townhouses, condos, coops, new construction, gut reno, etc
Let take this example from the article:
"Carroll Gardens — traditionally one of Brooklyn’s most expensive neighborhoods — was conspicuously absent from top 10 rankings at the start of the year. Claiming #4 with a $2.79 million median sale price in Q1 2024, Carroll Gardens’ median sale price was halved to just $1.38 million". I know pretty well this neighborhood and the market there and this is not the actual case that overall prices in Carrol Gardens halved (even if the median price over the Q1 transactions halved)! It's just probably the type of property sold in Q1 that changed, the market is made of townhouses and new developments of condos and also some coops, the mix of sales in a given quarter is very far from homogeneous.
The article goes on to say essentially the same thing:
"Among these was the whopping 145% price surge in Madison that lifted the neighborhood from last year’s #104 to its current spot at #25. This came as Madison went from $510,000 a year ago to the current $1.25 million median sale price due to a significant shift in its sold-property mix." Pretty sure median transaction prices in Madison Brooklyn will collapse by nearly 50% next quarter once the transaction property mix will change again...
Maybe it’s rising more than other areas in the U.S. at the moment and that is the news?
From my anecdata, homes in many suburban areas of southern states are up 70% from 2020 whereas in NYC the rise is about 20% (co-ops) resales (existing housing inventory).
I was watching a YouTube video reporting that more wealthy individuals are moving into NYC, driving up prices. As a result, they’re now competing for housing that was traditionally affordable for the middle class.
NYC area real estate certainly isn’t cheap, but compared to the insanity on the west coast there’s a lot to like. NYC has really bounced back after COVID and is a real hub of activity again. Folks want to be a part of that.
Also the second home market for NYC is strong. Having a place in the city is a status symbol for many. Nobody cares if you have an apartment in the Bay Area or other cities with expensive property but lots of folks want a “small place” to spend weekends in NYC.
That all also keeps prices rising. Not saying it’s good, but betting against NYC real estate is not advisable.
This is median sale price so it could be driven by more expensive homes going on the market. It could be further exacerbated by overall sales declining. The wealthy bail out but everyone else is stuck, possibly upside down.
Going back to December it was widely believe that Trump's administration would usher in a bonanza of merge and acquisition activity, an area that has run quite cool during Biden's term. For many people M&A activity is also spelt b-o-n-u-s-e-s so I guess some of this is people spending a bonus they don't yet have and, as things have turned out, won't be getting, at least in the foreseeable.
Mark my words, the lower Hudson valley is the number one place on earth I would be buying real estate right now if possible. Best public transit in the entire country; you can be at Grand Central in an hour flat, trains run every 30 minutes all day. And homes are still attainable by normal human beings (~$500k gets you something nice in a decent area). Completely slept on region atm.
I remember all the hype during Covid about falling home prices in metro areas like SF and NYC. Sure enough, as I suspected, it would prove temporary. Good news for those who held or bought, bad news for those looking to buy or need to rent.
> the dollar lost about 10% of valuation, and GDP is contracting .3% in Q1
> How this relates to property valuations isn't clear to me
If I was a rich person living outside of the US, and I wanted to find a solid way to park my money in times of such uncertainty rn, I would probably want to invest in property in the US. It could be a complete nothingburger in terms of total numbers to cause such property value growth, but I am just saying.
Real estate is local. Hard to conclude much from a single (desirable) area.
Scroll down to the two tables at the bottom in this link to compare metro areas:
https://www.realtor.com/research/march-2025-data/
Sure, NYC metro is up 10%, but the median price ($780k) is still far from LA/Orange County (an eye-watering $1.2 M median) and San Jose/Sunnyvale at $1.4 M.
Cleveland and Buffalo are at ~$250k median though...and they are technically "coastal" cities :)
What about $/sqft?
Or $/acre of actual land?
This is YoY Q1 for NYC. I’d be curious whether this holds for the first half of the year. Likely no. Bay Area prices are also expected to fall due to market volatility.
I think the reason for this is pretty intuitive: more expensive (NYC/Bay Area) homes are purchased by high income people. And higher incomes are more affected by the stock market because high comps are composed of higher % stock. Someone making 200k might have 20% stock. Someone making 600k might have 50% stock. So a 10% drop in stock market costs the first person 2% of their comp and the second person 5% of their comp.
1. Stock is mostly a tech thing, which is a smaller percentage of NYC home buyers.
2. Real estate is a safe haven asset to put capital into. In uncertain markets some buyers will choose real estate over stock or other more risky investments. NYC real estate is a highly valued asset globally.
3. Real estate prices in prime global locations (London, Dubai, NYC) are determined more by global liquidity than by local wages.
4. Recessions often impact real estate prices less than stock prices. 2007 was an outlier because of how many defaults occurred in real estate. In general the mortgages today are much stronger than before.
5. If mortgage rates decrease then that would have upwards pressure on housing valuations.
EDIT: Prices might come down, but I wouldn't expect fantastic bargains in NYC.
10.5% of jobs in the NYC are financial services.
While the bigger investment banks pay mostly stock at the higher comp levels, most everyone depends on salary and, or course, bonus. In the highly paid buy side trading firms, bonus is your salary or multiples. No doubt people buy into the stock market with that.
So your analysis about stock market performance and the housing market isn't completely off, when it comes to NYC. You just need to compare the Bay Area and Mag 7 type performance with NYC and S&P performance.
The job market, too. It's confusing, it seems like there's not as much selling or buying as in boom times, because of uncertainty (at least anecdotally). The median price is meaningless if the number of sales is down.
This is not surprising at all. Gold is up 23% year to date priced in dollars. The euro is up about 10% year to date.
A commensurate rise in real estate prices for arguably the most international city in the USA seems logical.
It's like how UK stock prices are inversely correlated with shifts in GBP.
unsustainable. and should be unconscionable. almost every pressing social problem can be traced back to the lack of housing supply (of course, some traces are looser than others)
NYC housing price increases have been unsustainable for several decades now.
What is actually unconscionable is that when the nature and consequences of inflationary money are exposed, the discussion immediately gets shut down. If the people were to understand what real money is, and it is not the national currency, then people would hold it instead of holding the national currency. Hint: real money is things like GLD/VTC/BTC/PAXG/XMR. Secondly, people also are instructed by the consumerist system to spend as much as they earn, effectively to not save or invest. Controlling the narrative about money is how the rich control the poor.
If we are going for a reductivism, I'm going to take it all the way to pride, greed, and envy for the housing supply problem.
(I could throw in lust, but that's last century's problem since various forms of birth control have negated its influence on housing demand)
Surely it's not so simple when New York City is building more housing supply that essentially any other American city (and has the best public transit system in the nation)
You'd think NYC would reach a point where the market wouldn't bear any more price increases, but we're not there yet.
NYC is unlike most housing markets in that for a lot of people, an international pied-a-terre in NYC is a sign of luxury and wealth, whereas no one really gives a crap if you have a second home in Seattle or Chicago or Boston.
In the US the only other markets that operate like that are probably LA, Miami, maybe Honolulu.
According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report, the USA alone has ~26m millionaires, and ~85m in the whole world.
A lot of them want to live in NYC, and many times more than that want to visit.
I thought that 20 years ago.
>You'd think NYC would reach a point where the market wouldn't bear any more price increases, but we're not there yet.
You'd be thinking this since 1873
and may never be.
Interesting given NYC's population still hasn't recovered from its early 2020 high [0], rent and home prices keep rising (and fast). There are many reasons discussed here: pied-a-terre's, foreign investors, lack of new construction and inventory at affordable levels contributing to low vacancy [1] but still hard to fathom at a naive supply and demand level, shouldn't ~300k less people and several new residential buildings finishing construction in the past few years contribute to lower not higher prices? [2]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/nyregion/nyc-population-2...
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-24/new-york-city-s-vac...
[2] https://s-media.nyc.gov/agencies/dcp/assets/files/pdf/data-t... (page 3)
I think the headline is pretty misleading and meaningless. The 10% median increase across the city is pretty useless as a statistic. For instance the median by neighborhood is widely different! the median in Manhattan as a whole is double the median of the city see the map in the article to realize that NYC market is a collection of sub-markets with their own dynamics and type of property mix the price per sqft is widely different between townhouses, condos, coops, new construction, gut reno, etc
Let take this example from the article: "Carroll Gardens — traditionally one of Brooklyn’s most expensive neighborhoods — was conspicuously absent from top 10 rankings at the start of the year. Claiming #4 with a $2.79 million median sale price in Q1 2024, Carroll Gardens’ median sale price was halved to just $1.38 million". I know pretty well this neighborhood and the market there and this is not the actual case that overall prices in Carrol Gardens halved (even if the median price over the Q1 transactions halved)! It's just probably the type of property sold in Q1 that changed, the market is made of townhouses and new developments of condos and also some coops, the mix of sales in a given quarter is very far from homogeneous.
The article goes on to say essentially the same thing: "Among these was the whopping 145% price surge in Madison that lifted the neighborhood from last year’s #104 to its current spot at #25. This came as Madison went from $510,000 a year ago to the current $1.25 million median sale price due to a significant shift in its sold-property mix." Pretty sure median transaction prices in Madison Brooklyn will collapse by nearly 50% next quarter once the transaction property mix will change again...
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I see home prices in Dallas are down by about 10% from peak.
Austin is down 20%. Doesn’t make sense to me. I keep hearing “they overbuilt” - so what, none of the builders saw this coming either?
Maybe it’s rising more than other areas in the U.S. at the moment and that is the news?
From my anecdata, homes in many suburban areas of southern states are up 70% from 2020 whereas in NYC the rise is about 20% (co-ops) resales (existing housing inventory).
I was watching a YouTube video reporting that more wealthy individuals are moving into NYC, driving up prices. As a result, they’re now competing for housing that was traditionally affordable for the middle class.
The question is whenever it is more than inflation or less, averaged out since the last few years.
Of course the other major effect seen worldwide is that people naturally concentrate in bigger cities and the countryside is dying out.
I wonder how NYC would look like if it were managed by Singapore.
Fining people for spitting in public would not fly with social justice warriors in NYC.
Half the population would risk getting flogged. NYers don't really follow laws as they are, much less Singaporean ones.
It's a great premise for a comedic series on Netflix.
NYC area real estate certainly isn’t cheap, but compared to the insanity on the west coast there’s a lot to like. NYC has really bounced back after COVID and is a real hub of activity again. Folks want to be a part of that.
Also the second home market for NYC is strong. Having a place in the city is a status symbol for many. Nobody cares if you have an apartment in the Bay Area or other cities with expensive property but lots of folks want a “small place” to spend weekends in NYC.
That all also keeps prices rising. Not saying it’s good, but betting against NYC real estate is not advisable.
I'm surprised they're rising given NYC is an 'international' city and wealthy foreigners seem to be leaving the US.
This is median sale price so it could be driven by more expensive homes going on the market. It could be further exacerbated by overall sales declining. The wealthy bail out but everyone else is stuck, possibly upside down.
Going back to December it was widely believe that Trump's administration would usher in a bonanza of merge and acquisition activity, an area that has run quite cool during Biden's term. For many people M&A activity is also spelt b-o-n-u-s-e-s so I guess some of this is people spending a bonus they don't yet have and, as things have turned out, won't be getting, at least in the foreseeable.
Mark my words, the lower Hudson valley is the number one place on earth I would be buying real estate right now if possible. Best public transit in the entire country; you can be at Grand Central in an hour flat, trains run every 30 minutes all day. And homes are still attainable by normal human beings (~$500k gets you something nice in a decent area). Completely slept on region atm.
500k for a house makes me realize how low my pay is in a rural area compared to metropolitan areas and how low property is here comparatively as well.
If instead you compare in gold price or weight adjusted terms, the cost is sustainable. That's what real money is, not the national currency.
I remember all the hype during Covid about falling home prices in metro areas like SF and NYC. Sure enough, as I suspected, it would prove temporary. Good news for those who held or bought, bad news for those looking to buy or need to rent.
Strong signal inflation is out and the Fed can cut rates to weather the short term tariff pain.... right? Ah no hang on, the other way round.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The rents are also way out of control. The city is the best place on earth
Clearly the congestion pricing has amazing side effects as people now enjoy living in the city even more! /s
On a serious note, the dollar lost about 10% of valuation, and GDP is contracting .3% in Q1.
How this relates to property valuations isn't clear to me, but you can't say this is an apples to (big) apples comparison from the past year either.
> the dollar lost about 10% of valuation, and GDP is contracting .3% in Q1
> How this relates to property valuations isn't clear to me
If I was a rich person living outside of the US, and I wanted to find a solid way to park my money in times of such uncertainty rn, I would probably want to invest in property in the US. It could be a complete nothingburger in terms of total numbers to cause such property value growth, but I am just saying.
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