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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.
I live and own in NYC. Stock is very much also a part of comp in finance as well (I’m not in it, but my wife is).
I think you are spot on that prices will come down slightly (bonus pools will drop and that matters) but NYC real estate is rarely a bargain (or at least hasn’t been since 1998).
2009 - 2013 there were some good bargains in LIC and other areas. It will take a major recession to see some prices come down again to some reasonable level.
Also, I wonder what the volume of transactions is. Because I see little inventory (I was looking into Brooklyn), and perhaps only new construction is selling, which means it skews prices higher (new construction is always more expensive).
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.
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?
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How does $/acre apply to NYC?
Each unit effectively owns a percentage of the overall land under the building
Could apply to some areas of Brooklyn and Queens.
Acreage in NYC isn't free, but in multistory condos where everyone is using the same acreage seems like that's not a fee that should even move the needle in prices. It's not like there's any acreage available for sale to even get a comp, so does $/acre even get discussed in NYC real estate?
In this regard, acre/$ only makes sense in countryside and suburbia, or maybe in suburbia that pretends to be a city, like much of Houston. It should not apply to cities with their apartment buildings.
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.
The same can be said about a number of big cities over the past 30 years. Perhaps there ought to be limits of corporate ownership of residential properties and limits to the number any individual (non corporation) can own too. Also, limits to overseas buyers to prevent gentrification by foreign capital flight. Housing should be for real people who aren't billionaires.
Why does corporate ownership matter?
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)
Changing human pride, greed and envy is hard. We know how to build housing. Or we used to.
> I'm going to take it all the way to pride, greed, and envy for the housing supply problem.
Eh, I mean greed in other economic environments would cause people to build ever taller condos and apartment buildings to get more and more revenue.
That happens-- castillogrande in Cartagena Colombia used to be a bunch of family homes. Now it looks like Miami. China has tried it, but built a little much.
A problem in doing it in other places is location and regulations (e.g., whole areas where high rises are outlawed, or required to have expensive shrubbery, or a certain percentage of units for low income)
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)
Source? NYC chronically under builds. It's ranked #35 in new housing construction: https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-investing-m...
That link you shared is counting the number of units build per 1k existing units.
Given how dense and populated NYC is (aka how many existing units there are), this metric isn't as meaningful. I believe the grandparent comment was talking about the raw number of units.
Actually, go to the bottom of the page you shared and look at the section titled "Full results", then sort by "Total new housing units authorized". Sadly, you will need to do some quick manual work to parse the results, because it sorts numbers as strings rather than as actual numbers. But you can clearly see from there that NYC is #1 in terms of raw numbers of new housing units. And that's data from 2021, and afaik NYC only increased those numbers significantly in the past 4 years.
"# of new homes / # of people"
Is the only way to access if new home construction will affect prices. NYC is chronically underbidding.
Raw numbers are meaningless when the rate of home building relative to job growth is what defines prices.
Sure. What was the rate of homebuilding to job growth in NYC and other major metro areas in the US?
I am not trying to be snarky, I actually agree with you. I just simply don't have that data on hand right now. But I am aligned with you in suspecting that the rate of home building to job growth would be a better indicator of the real housing market change (as opposed to the ratio of new residential units/1k residents or, to a lesser degree, raw numbers of new residential units).
It is even more accurate to consider job growth in terms of income growth. Job growth could very well go negative but if it means replacement of a working population with one of higher income, that also contributes to upward pressure on prices from this high income job growth.
Even worse for the supply side crunch is that this high income population is not like the previous population in the sense that they aren't as sensitive to this given price level. So demand based responses to price increases aren't seen until the prices are truly bewildering due to the amount of disposable income available for some of these workers that could be spent on housing.
Here’s data from 2021-2025 using https://socds.huduser.gov/permits/index.html
New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA
~21 million people
2021: 59,383 total units
2022: 60,602
2023: 41,674
2024: 61,159
2025: 6,777
Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX
~7.5 million people
2021: 69,007 total units
2022: 75,786
2023: 68,336
2024: 65,296
2025: 11,057
Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX
~8 million people
2021: 74,617 total units
2022: 77,501
2023: 66,725
2024: 72,319
2025: 9,836
Using Houston alone, NYC is not #1 in raw numbers and in 2025 so far is only permitting 60% as many units as a CBSA 3x smaller than it.
I don’t know if HOU/DFW are the CBSAs pumping out the most units nationally though, they just came to mind.
Houston in Dallas who can simply expand externally into new land are hardly a proxy for a land real estate constrained city like New York that has to build vertically
And how is their mass transportation going? As if houses alone are all that matters.
Surely it's not so simple when New York City is building more housing supply that essentially any other American city
can clearly see from there that NYC is #1 in terms of raw numbers of new housing units
Are the original goalposts, housing supply alone is an important factor in the price of housing though fwiw.
Find me anything that resembles something like this for any other American city https://newyorkyimby.com/
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.
On what planet is BTC "real money"?
Can you use it for the main uses of money, store value and payment? No, you cannot, because it's very volatile, and very slow and expensive to transact it.
It's as much "real money" as worn t-shirts from sports players are.
The volatility comes with its reward, which is price dips for buying cheaply and price appreciation. Bitcoin Lightning Network is its solution which is cheaper to transact in for those that accept it. Personally I would use Monero for transactions.
It sounds like you're extolling the investment opportunities, which is kind of the opposite of what most people are looking to get out of currency.
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.
"is a sign of luxury and wealth"
I wish they'd just go to therapy instead
. . . or they're rich enough to buy it, but they legitimately enjoy having it?
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For a lot of people, many more I would guess, there is no substitute for access to the city, culture, highly skilled dynamic people and organizations, etc.
LA is a huge sprawling pile of homes of various prices. Portions of LA have some cachet but a "second home" in LA could be this wonderful box:
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/10955-S-Spring-St-Los-Ang...
That’s not even really a listing for a house, if I was interested in purchasing it I would take the land value and subtract the cost to demolish the building to get a fair value.
Nearly all metropolitan housing markets have bad areas; you can find a home for <200k in the South Bronx in NYC, for example.
Yeah, my point was that I doubt a 10% increase in prices is being driven by people shopping zip codes.
They want the actual residence for whatever reason - more than they want the money.
While they want specific residences, it does also have the effect of driving the market up more broadly, because people who would otherwise buy those units must then bid up the next available units.
Some bits of Colorado maybe?
ski towns and places like Jackson Hole or Bozeman are unique in their own right but my understanding is that the demand there is mostly domestic-driven, amplified by a by-definition small housing market size.
this doesn't affect big cities near nature nearly as much, like SLC or Denver.
Does New Jersey get no love ?
Well no, because the entire point of using an NY address for clout is that it's in NY. NJ is definitively not NY for that purpose.
Housing is also pricey in NJ adjacent to NYC in cities like Jersey City and Hoboken, but its a ferry / PATH train away from Manhattan.
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.
Millionaire money is not "second home in NYC" money these days.
Enough for "rent an apartment in NYC" or "holiday in NYC" though
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>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
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In NYC, the price could always go up. One of the few places on the planet where there is no ceiling.
I thought that 20 years ago.
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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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.
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.
Fining? Don't they publicly cane?
It seems to work! It's one of the cleanest places I've ever been to.
Strange how pervasive this idea is.
Corporal punishment in Singpaore is not delivered in public, certain classes of offender are exempt, and those offenses it is imposed for are completely unrelated to public levels of cleanliness.
From Wikipedia [1] ...
Singaporean law allows caning to be ordered for over 35 offences, including hostage-taking/kidnapping, robbery, gang robbery with murder, rioting, causing grievous hurt, drug abuse, vandalism, extortion, voyeurism, sexual abuse, molestation (outrage of modesty),[16] and unlawful possession of weapons. Caning is also a mandatory punishment for certain offences such as rape, drug trafficking, illegal moneylending,[17] and for foreigners who overstay by more than 90 days – a measure designed to deter illegal immigrants
> drug abuse
> vandalism
> unlawful possession of weapons
> drug trafficking
> foreigners who overstay by more than 90 days
Majority of the things you listed, for which caning is either allowed or mandatory in Singapore, would cover a crazily massive number of cases in NYC.
And I am not saying this as someone who is in favor of this happening. I am not at all in favor of caning laws (similar to Singapore or otherwise).
Just saying that the argument you make does not sound as convincing as you imagine it might to most people who live in NYC. It essentially feels like hearing "all those people having misconceptions about caning as a punishment for committing crime in Singapore being common. It only applies to some very specific crimes, such as <proceeds to list the types of crime that are a bulk of crimes that people in NYC experience>". By that metric, me walking past a double-digit number of people per day doing things, for which they could get punished with caning in Singapore, counts as rare.
The part of my comment you are referring to was me responding to the assertion "It seems to work! It's one of the cleanest places I've ever been to".
With the possible exception of 'vandalism', none of the offenses for which it may be applied [1] have any impact on visitors perception of cleanliness, that was my "argument" (although I don't think my comment merits the term).
> With the possible exception of 'vandalism', none of the offenses for which it may be applied [1] have any impact on visitors perception of cleanliness, that was my "argument" (although I don't think my comment merits the term).
Fair enough. Agreed, with the only exception being that I would also add drug abuse to the list.
Look, I am not some anti-drug puritan at all. But I would argue that people injecting in the middle of a busy street intersection are definitely gonna have an impact on visitors’ perception of cleanliness. Besides observing exactly this many times over the years I spent living in Seattle (as well as many adjacent scenarios, like the usual drugged out people attacking passerbys), it was also the first time I actually saw a dead body being carried away in a bodybag by EMTs/firemen. Saying that this won’t have effect on the visitors, but vandalism would, just feels wrong.
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.
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?
> so what, none of the builders saw this coming either?
This falls under the trivial fact that no one can see the future.
When you can build for x dollars and sell for 2x you still make money is prices go down 20%. Austin is one of the few metros that is building the amount they need
Austin is at the “Californians aren’t over enthusiastically overbidding to move to Austin, so the prices are where they should be” real estate pricing.
Makes me glad. It means my kids might be able to afford houses when the time comes.
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.
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).
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 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.
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'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.
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.
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.
The rents are also way out of control. The city is the best place on earth
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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)_/¯
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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