Bidding Wars for Luxe Hamptons Homes Have Reached a Record High
If you’re looking to snap up property out east, you better be ready for a fight.
In the second quarter of 2023, bidding wars for luxury homes in the Hamptons reached a record high, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. Thirty-one percent of deals occurred after multiple offers, up from the previous high of 27 percent a year ago, according to data from the appraiser Miller Samuel and the brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate.
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“The majority of it is the lack of inventory,” Justin Agnello, a Douglas Elliman agent working in East Hampton, told Bloomberg. “But it’s also that if you do bring something to the market that’s really appealing, buyers are even more hungry for it.”
Here, luxury homes are defined as the most expensive 10 percent of transactions; in the second quarter, that included all homes that sold for $4.4. million or more. In total, there were 26 luxury sales in Q2, with the median sales price sitting just below $6.4 million. That’s 6.6 percent higher than pre-pandemic numbers, but 25 percent less than the median a year ago.
That drop is indicative of trends happening throughout the Hamptons real-estate market. Across all single-family homes and condos in the area, the median sales price was just $1.5 million, down 9.4 percent from last year. And closings, which numbered 259, declined 41 percent, according to Miller Samuel and Douglas Elliman.
Even still, 21 percent of Hamptons homes went for above their asking price. One such property, a five-bedroom oceanfront manse, was listed for $3.3 million, with an expected sales price of just $3 million. In the end, after a four-way bidding war, the house closed for more than $3.5 million.
And despite the recent downturn compared with the sales and prices at the height of the pandemic, the Hamptons are faring well when you look at pre-pandemic numbers. Since the second quarter of 2019, the median sales price has increased a whopping 71 percent. “That’s an extreme comparison,” Jonathan Miller, the president of Miller Samuel, told Bloomberg. “While most housing markets have seen substantial increases because of lack of supply, that’s a big number.”
Yet it’s not so big that people aren’t willing to go to battle to get their hands on some coveted beachfront real estate.
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