Hamptons Housing Market May Be in For Selling Swell

The tide of the Hamptons residential market could rise this year.

The market on the East End is expected to pick up in the coming months compared to recent years, Bloomberg reported. Anecdotal signs of an emerging market are already appearing in the area, which recently saw a flood of people come through open houses, an indicator of interest.

February saw 116 sales of single-family homes in the Hamptons, according to data from Douglas Elliman and appraiser Miller Samuel, marking a 51 percent surge from the previous year. Contracts also jumped 44 percent.

Open houses don’t necessarily mean robust sales, and despite mortgage rates settling down, inventory remains a concern.

There are improvements being made in housing inventory. In January, for instance, there was a 16 percent annual increase in new listings.

It’s still a concern, though, and a robust housing market doesn’t only need sales prices to surge — it also requires deal volume. At the end of last year, there were fewer than 1,000 single-family homes on the market. It was barely half the number of homes on the market at the end of 2019.

“Inventory is still very scarce,” Official co-founder Tal Alexander told Bloomberg. “There’s definitely more buyers out there than there are real sellers.”

The Hamptons can historically count on the housing market warming up in the spring before well-heeled buyers drift out east.

With some solid Wall Street numbers coming down the line in recent months, wealthy buyers are already coming out of the woodwork, or at least that’s what sellers have been anticipating. Last month brought a 136 percent annual gain in new Hamptons listings priced between $5 million and $9.99 million. Three home listings last month exceeded $20 million.

In the fourth quarter, the median single-family home price in the Hamptons was $1.85 million, a 45 percent increase from the same period a year earlier. For the top 10 percent of the market, the $12.6 million median price represented an 87 percent annual increase.

“Overall, we expect 2024 to behave more like 2022 than 2023, and featuring moderate, sustainable growth,” Nest Seekers chief economist Erin Sykes told The Real Deal.

— Holden Walter-Warner