‘European Villa’

Also in the quarter, an eight-bedroom oceanfront home on East Hampton’s Drew Lane sold for $24.7 million. The 7,000- square-foot (650-square-meter) “European villa” sits atop a dune, according to the listing on Zillow.com. The owners sought $40 million for the property in April 2010, the website shows.

Two additional reports on the Hamptons market today also show jumps in luxury-home purchases in the fourth quarter. New York brokerage Brown Harris Stevens said completed deals for at least $2.5 million surged 98 percent from a year earlier. The median sale price rose 16 percent to $975,000.

The Corcoran Group said the median price climbed 7 percent to $900,000. Prices for vacant land slipped 3 percent to a median of $575,000, according to the brokerage’s report.

The inventory of available homes for sale in the Hamptons plunged 12 percent to 1,023, the lowest in the six years that Miller Samuel has been tracking that data. The absorption rate, or the amount of time it would take to sell all the properties at the current pace of sales, is 5.8 months, the fastest since 2006 and down from 8.6 months a year earlier.

Serious Buyers

Lauren Sharfman said interest in her gut-renovated Wainscott home picked up toward the end of the year. She first listed the five-bedroom property for sale in October 2011 at $3.75 million, only to see visitors casually give it a glance and make tentative offers. After almost a year and a price cut, buyers started getting serious.

In the boom times of 2007, “people got all excited about getting a place” in the Hamptons after enjoying three months of weekends at the beach, she said.

“This was the first summer in a while where people had that mood again,” said Sharfman, co-founder and former chief executive officer of the jewelry brand Ippolita. “It seemed like people in my price range were actually ready to move.”

She bought the Wainscott property for $1.97 million in 2010 and designed her “dream home,” building two additions with 24- foot (7-meter) ceilings, she said. A buyer went into contract in October and the deal closed in December for $3.45 million.