NYC home prices rise 10% in early 2025
qns.com
qns.com
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.
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 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).
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).
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.
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 :)
Or $/acre of actual land?
A commensurate rise in real estate prices for arguably the most international city in the USA seems logical.
(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)
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.
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)
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.
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).
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.
Is the only way to access if new home construction will affect prices. NYC is chronically underbidding.
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.
And how is their mass transportation going? As if houses alone are all that matters.
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.
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.
In the US the only other markets that operate like that are probably LA, Miami, maybe Honolulu.
this doesn't affect big cities near nature nearly as much, like SLC or Denver.
I wish they'd just go to therapy instead
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/10955-S-Spring-St-Los-Ang...
They want the actual residence for whatever reason - more than they want the money.
A lot of them want to live in NYC, and many times more than that want to visit.
You'd be thinking this since 1873
[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)
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...
It seems to work! It's one of the cleanest places I've ever been to.
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
> 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.
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.
It's a great premise for a comedic series on Netflix.
This falls under the trivial fact that no one can see the future.
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).
Of course the other major effect seen worldwide is that people naturally concentrate in bigger cities and the countryside is dying out.
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.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
> 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.