Buyers flocked to ‘top tier’ neighborhoods in 2020
Nearly 1,700 changes of address were registered with USPS
Greenwich, Darien and New Canaan outpaced rival towns in Westchester County, N.Y., by a comfortable margin as a pandemic destination or escape in 2020, according to a CBRE analysis of U.S. Postal Service data.
The “top tier” sections of the three towns studied by CBRE generated nearly 1,700 changes of address with the U.S. Postal Service in 2020, compared to 1,100 for the wealthiest six Westchester County ZIP codes directly west that add up to roughly the same aggregate population approaching 100,000 people.
Mark Pruner, a broker in the Greenwich office with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England Properties, said many wealthy buyers are choosing Green
wich over Westchester County because of lower taxes in Connecticut versus New York.
Those decisions make a difference in Hartford, Pruner said, as wealthy New York City pandemic transplants settle in and send out their first income tax payments to Connecticut.
“Westchester has some of the highest property taxes in the country,” said Pruner. “And a recurring issue is the effort to tax high-income people in New York. They just passed the ‘millionaires tax’ — that’s a big deal.”
If 2020 was a harbinger of things to come, the pendulum could be swinging east into Connecticut — and with Greenwich taxpayers averaging $28,000 in income taxes according to state data, giving a nudge to the state budget that could add up to well in excess of $20 million annually.
But any further big increase in new arrivals is constrained by a limited number of properties on the market. More than 225 Greenwich homes became available in April, Berkshire Hathway reports, and more than 100 sold in the town that month.
CBRE reserves the term “top tier” for just 5 percent of
ZIP codes in Connecticut and New York. That includes four Greenwich ZIP codes, two more in Darien and New Canaan, and nine just across the border in Westchester County, N.Y. — often looked at by higher-income workers leaving New York City or
transferring from other parts of the country as potential places to live.
In 2020, the momentum was on the Connecticut side of the border; Greenwich, Darien and New Canaan saw a year-over-year gain of more than 1,200 relocations, compared
with a gain of less than 40 across a pair of Harrison ZIP codes and four more in Scarsdale, Larchmont, Rye and New Rochelle, as analyzed by CBRE.
Add to that net moves to and from the inland Westchester communities of Armonk,
Bedford and Katanoh — the latter landing Connecticut’s most famous “wantaway,” after Martha Stewart moved there more than 15 years ago from Westport — and Westchester’s eastern “top tier” towns surpass their counterpart Connecticut towns by a mere 30 changes of address on a net basis, but having a combined population base of 40,000 more residents.
Tack on Cos Cob to the Greenwich totals, however, and the three Connecticut towns push out front of nine ZIP codes in Greenwich.
With its mix of families, singles and white-collar earners, Cos Cob falls under the “urban chic” category in the CBRE report — a description borrowed from GIS mapping software Esri.
The “urban chic” also applies to a small group of communities ranging from Westport, Southport and East Hampton, N.Y.; to the West Rocks area of New Haven and north to Farmington.
Paul Breunich, CEO of William Pitt Sotheby’s International Realty in Stamford, said the pendulum’s direction this year in any community is tied directly to where new listings are surfacing.
“Westchester ... was down hard for something like three months last year so they were behind Connecticut, but they’ve started to catch back up,” said Breunich. “There’s so much outside demand coming in, I think people are looking everywhere.”