There's doom and gloom about the economy, but million-dollar Hamptons home sales are booming

Business Insider

4 days ago

Demand for luxury real estate in the Hamptons is only growing. Sales and home prices have surged over the last year.
Rising prices in the tony enclave are nothing new. The pandemic ushered in a surge of buyers looking to escape the city. The median sales price of homes in the Hamptons in the first quarter of 2025 was more than $2 million, a 13% increase over the previous year and nearly double what it was five years ago, according to a recent Douglas Elliman report.
Perhaps more notably, the pace of sales is also soaring this year. Sales were up about 86% in the first quarter over the same time period last year, according to the Douglas Elliman report. That's after home sales fell in the wake of the pandemic buying frenzy, and haven't returned to the highs of 2020.
"The tired story of the housing recovery coming out of the pandemic is high prices, low sales," Jonathan Miller, who leads the real estate appraisal and consulting firm Miller Samuel and authored the Douglas Elliman report, told Business Insider. "The Hamptons doesn't fit that pattern. It's high prices and high sales."
Miller added that the sharp rise in sales is "unusual and counter to the prevailing trends."
Susan Breitenbach, a top Hamptons real estate agent with the Corcoran Group, said she's closed more deals so far this year than in all of 2024. She's sold a slew of luxury homes, including a $17.5 million oceanfront property in Bridgehampton, an Amagansett home for $13 million, a Sag Harbor home on less than an acre for $21 million, and a Southampton house for $5.6 million.
"It was really very surprising," Breitenbach, who's been selling property in the Hamptons for more than 30 years, told BI.
While some agents like Breitenbach are closing deals at the highest end of the market, the middle of the Hamptons market — homes between $1 million and $5 million — has driven the uptick in sales. These "meat and potatoes" sales, Miller said, are way up.
So-called "tangible assets," like luxury real estate in very in-demand markets, can be particularly attractive to certain investors when markets are wobbly.
Global stocks plummeted following Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs announcement, and while they've mostly rebounded since the administration walked back some of their tariffs, markets are on edge. In early June, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development cut its forecast for the US economic growth rate in 2025 from 2.8% to 1.6%, citing Trump's trade policies.
"Hamptons real estate has a long history of appreciating over time," Andrew Saunders, president of the Hamptons real estate brokerage Saunders & Associates, told BI. Some more cautious buyers "might look at what's happening in the world at large and say, 'You know what, I'm going to wait a month or two and let the world take a few spins and see what happens.' But we're not seeing that occur en masse."
Miller credited big Wall Street bonuses in 2024 for some of the spike in sales and agreed that market volatility could be pushing some to diversify their investments.
The Hamptons rental market might be more sensitive to economic uncertainty. Breitenbach said rental interest was much higher than usual in January but has since fallen off. Miller, who doesn't track rentals in the Hamptons, added that an increase in sales would naturally lead to a drop in rental demand.
Breitenbach recently listed a home on 2.5 acres of oceanfront property in Water Mill, which sits between Southampton and Bridgehampton, for $44.5 million. "It's not about the house, it's about the land," she added. "And that's a deal."
Hamptons buyers are from all over. Breitenbach said she's seen an uptick in California buyers this year, and she still has foreign buyers. But a large share of her clients are still Manhattanites.
"A lot of it is the high-end New York — Manhattan — buyers, because there aren't many places they can go on the weekends," she said.
Breitenbach said Memorial Day weekend this year felt more packed than ever out east, even with cooler-than-normal weather. "It looked like Fourth of July," she said.
She doesn't expect market volatility and even threats of a recession to change that.