New York luxury real estate could be a bargain in 2021

Bloomberg

Judging by the last quarter of 2020, New York’s luxury real estate market should enter 2021 with confidence.
Sales of homes that cost more than $4 million were a little above those of the same three months in 2019, says Donna Olshan, president of luxury real estate broker Olshan Realty. “Now, some of that has to do with demand that was never met, because we lost the most important quarter—the spring,” she says.
But the tick upward is also, she says, “because most of these sales are [to] New Yorkers, or from the New York metro area, betting on the home team. They are getting Covid-19 discounts, they’re looking at the long-term prospects of New York, and they’re buying.”

As the city looks toward next year, the known unknowns loom large. The timeline of the vaccine rollouts is opaque. A proposed pied-à-terre tax, dreaded by everyone in the industry, remains possible. And the economic futures of the city, the country, and the world are up in the air.
But the city’s luxury residential market has enough momentum to make experts feel comfortable making some conditional predictions.
While suburban sales are still up year over year, “it’s just no longer a rocket ship of growth,” he says. “And the jump in pricing, largely caused by what I would call panic buying—where people left the city out of fear—that was front end-loaded, and I don’t see a compelling reason why that [price growth] can be sustainable.”
The median price for luxury home sales in the fourth quarter in Brooklyn is expected to be up 5.5% year-over-year, according to UrbanDigs data. (“Luxury” in Brooklyn is defined by UrbanDigs as anything over $2 million.) Contracts signed are up an anticipated 26.2% for the same period, and days on the market are down by nearly half.