Hamptons are back as a ‘Sound’ investment
Buyers are coming back to the Hamptons. However, they’re not splurging on mansions.
Across all price tiers, purchases in the Long Island beach towns rose 8 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier to 472, the biggest increase since 2014, according to a report late last week by appraiser Miller Samuel and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate.
But the high end of the market fizzled. Just 27 homes sold for $5 million or more, the fewest for a quarter in more than three years. The dearth of ultraluxury deals in the Hamptons dragged the average sale price down 8.9 percent, to $1.72 million, the firms said.
“You had your first-time, second- home buyers, and they gravitated to areas where there was value,” said Ernest Cervi, a senior vice president at Corcoran Group, which released its own report on Hamptons sales Thursday.
Surging stocks and a Wall Street bonus pool that climbed for the first time in three years fueled buyer confidence in the Hamptons, a market whose fortunes are closely tied to vagaries of New York’s financial industry.
Sellers on Long Island’s south fork also helped coax home shoppers by being more negotiable on price.
Discounts for all Hamptons sales averaged 12 percent in the first quarter, up from less than 11 percent a year ear- lier, Miller Samuel and Douglas Elliman said. In the luxury category, defined in the quarter as $3.7 million or more, price cuts almost doubled, to 16 percent on average.
Markets like the Hamptons have “come back to life at a price point that really tells us that it’s the buyers who felt they could not make a move because they had the election and the world on their mind,” said Scott Durkin, chief operating officer for Douglas Elliman.
East of the Shinnecock Canal, 31 percent of sales were priced from more than $500,000 to $1 million, brokerage Brown Harris Stevens said in its own report Thursday.