Home purchases in New York City’s suburbs are topping last year’s highs due to unyielding buyer demand. The results? Record-high sales pace and soaring prices.
Suburban Surge Endures
Demand for single-family homes outside of New York City is as strong as ever…and in some cases, even stronger
Home sales in Greenwich CT are topping last year’s highs and properties in the Hudson Valley are setting record sales pace records. An appraiser in New Jersey believes relentless soaring prices due to relentless demand will continue for at least another year.
Westchester has been particularly popular with urban exiles. Single-family home sales soared +56% y/y in Q2 2021, the biggest annual increase in a decade, according to Miller Samuel and Douglas Elliman Real Estate. Westchester’s median home price leaped +16% to a record high of $826,500 as 47% of those record number of sales closed above list price.
Urbanites Also Flocking to More-Rural Regions
The Catskills as well as more affordable Duchess and Putnam counties are seeing “unusual” action, according to Joseph Satto, founder of brokerage Fresh Air Realty. “These buyers have reallocated their resources. They say ‘I was going to spend X amount on a place in the city and get a small country place, but now I’m flipping the script – I’m going to get a nicer place in the country.’”
Just as federally elected officials plan on spending midweek in the nation’s capital in an apartment shared with others while spending at least Friday through Monday working and living in their home districts, urbanite buyers are planning on spending at least Friday through Monday in the Catskills or Putnam County or Middlesex and Somerset Counties of New Jersey and three midweek days in the city.
Buyers Jumping on Cultural Change in How They’re Able to Live and Work
As companies attempt to plan how and when their employees “might” return to on-site work in the midst of soaring Delta cases, workers are buying houses that meet their budgetary and space needs.
Likewise, even in early spring pre-Delta, FlexJobs.com surveyed workers to find out what workers would do if/when asked to return to their offices. A solid 58% of those workers said they would “absolutely” look for a different job if they could not continue working from home. Brie Reynolds, a career development manager with FlexJobs, thinks that if her company surveyed workers today, much more than 58% of respondents would say they’d simply look elsewhere for another job if they “were not allowed” to keep working remotely.
Thanks to Bloomberg.
