New Yorkers are still swapping their tiny city apartments near subway lines for suburban abodes with backyards, even as employers signal they eventually want workers back in their Manhattan offices.
Home purchases in places like Greenwich, Connecticut, are topping last year’s exuberant highs, while properties in New York’s Hudson Valley are setting records for how fast they find takers. In New Jersey, one appraiser sees at least another year of soaring prices as a result of relentless demand.
The frenzy to acquire a home in the suburbs, which began as a way to isolate from crowds at the pandemic’s onset, is strong as ever, with buyers seizing on a cultural change in the way they’re able to live and work. While companies tinker with the how and when of restaffing skyscrapers, employees are filling the void with their own plans.
They’re buying housing that meets their budget and space needs first, and figuring out what that means for their office return down the line.
Contracts to buy suburban New York homes have scaled back from their frenzied pace at the height of the pandemic. Westchester County saw 20% more contracts last month than in June 2020.
“Some people know they never have to go back, and a lot of people are up in the air,” said Ken Wile, a Redfin agent in Westchester, the county just north of the city. “The plan is now they’ll be going in two or three days. I haven’t heard of many people who are going back five.”
Lee Maicon and his wife spent the past year and a half working from their two-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, occasionally sharing the tight space with Maicon’s teenage sons and their online classes. As their lease neared its end, they started making plans to move.
Maicon, 48, global head of strategy at the advisory firm Edelman, is back in his downtown Manhattan office twice a week, and he eventually expects to travel for business again. His wife recently started a remote job with a California-based company. And they just had a baby.
After seeing colleagues and friends move to distant places like suburban Philadelphia, the couple started their own search. They cast a wide net in Westchester, including the northern towns of Armonk and Chappaqua, but concluded they couldn’t quite commit to going that far. With Wile’s help, they settled on a four-bedroom home in New Rochelle, which they closed on this month, within days of their daughter’s arrival.
“It’s big enough that if we’re both working from home, we can have the kids there and not trip over ourselves,” Maicon said. “It’s an opportunity to create options while still acknowledging the reality of going to the office a few days a week.”
Westchester, appealing for its leafy, small towns and easy rail access to Manhattan, has been especially popular with urban exiles. Single-family home sales soared 56% in the second quarter from a year earlier, the biggest annual increase in a decade, according to Miller Samuel Inc. and Douglas Elliman Real Estate. The median price surged 16% to a record $826,500, as 47% of deals closed above the asking price—also an all-time high.