Buy-polar: Inside the fireworks-filled record highs and lows of 2021.
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It was a hell of year, for renters, buyers, sellers and even gawkers.
The ripple effects of COVID-19 turned NYC’s housing market into a seesaw: from empty neighborhoods and free-falling rents at the beginning of the year, to today’s record-breaking sales figures and radioactive monthly asks, as workers and families return to the city.
All the while, nobody told the superrich there was a pandemic happening.
A surging stock and crypto market helped them set price record after price record throughout the year, as they gobbled up massive homes, from Lower Manhattan to Billionaire’s Row, and from Brooklyn to the Hamptons.
Here’s a look at the insane real estate records, and the bonkers trends they created, set in New York’s wildest year yet.
Roller coaster records
These days, it’s hard to remember all the way back to January. But, if you recall, Manhattan was still a ghost town in the early months of the year.
Those with cash bought up secondary housing markets faster than changing COVID protocols. Young adults moved into their teenage bedrooms. Those who stayed in the city cashed in on discounted units.
Rents in the first quarter of this year plummeted to a decade low of $2,700 per month — the borough’s cheapest housing price recorded since StreetEasy, who shared a year’s worth of data with The Post, began tallying in 2010.
More lemon juice for the wound: $2,700-per-month rents represent a year-over-year drop of more than $700 from the days just before the pandemic hit us hard in 2020.
The devastation was tamer in beauteous Brooklyn.
Median rents there fell 10% year-over-year to $2,390 — its lowest level since 2011.
Queens saw its prices slip to $1,999, the first time they’d dipped below $2,000 in eight years.
But the deals — and juicy landlord concessions, including months of free rent — didn’t last.
Prices went parabolic, as deal-hungry renters triggered a tsunami of lease signings.
“The surge in new lease signings began when rents fell enough to trigger interest for those on the sidelines, who were priced out of the city,” said real estate appraiser and analyst Jonathan Miller, who found that 6,255 new leases were signed in Manhattan in 2021, compared to 3,969 a year prior — close to a 58% increase.
By November, the median asking rent in Manhattan had erupted back to $3,475 — just $25 shy of its pre-pandemic high of $3,500.
At the same time, more Manhattan apartments sold than at any point in the last three decades with 4,523 closed sales, according to Douglas Elliman, while Corcoran reported that sales topped $9.5 billion — the most in any recorded quarter thus far.
“I have always maintained that NYC is the comeback queen,” Brown Harris Stevens CEO Bess Freedman told The Post in July. “She bounced back from 9/11, the Lehman crash and she’s doing it again in the wake of COVID.”
All in all, the 2021 sales market saw the highest price points in over 32 years, the December Olshan report found, with the borough-wide median asking price soaring to $1.45 million, an 11% increase from November 2020.
In November alone, 422 homes priced above $3.85 million went into contract — the first time there had ever been more than 400 luxury sales in Manhattan in a single month, according to StreetEasy.
In Brooklyn, a $7.9 million penthouse sale at River Park set a new high for Cobble Hill in October, a $6.5 million 1880s-era townhouse at 198 Washington Park became Fort Greene’s most expensive deal ever in January, while a $16 million combined sale at Front & York broke records in Dumbo in November.
“A new fresh crop of buyers came from Manhattan, who had never considered Brooklyn before — and there was no sticker shock,” said Doug Bowen of Douglas Elliman.
In Queens, a sales record was set in Astoria in February when a two-bedroom penthouse at the Rowan sold for $1.69 million.
Monster mansions
Those record deals, however, are pebbles compared to the mountainous mansion sales Manhattan saw during the yo-yo 2021 market.
“People are obviously looking to sell at the highest price possible, and I think the timing in 2021 … is excellent for everybody. That’s why you’re seeing the number of trades that we’re getting.”
Saunders broker Mark J. Baron
In August, a mystery buyer dropped $50 million on a penthouse at 56 Leonard St. — a 60-story glass Herzog & de Meuron-designed skyscraper in Tribeca known as the “Jenga Building.” It was the most expensive downtown penthouse sale of the year, narrowly beating out the $49.5 million sale of F1 racecar driver Lewis Hamilton’s 443 Greenwich penthouse, and the $49 million penthouse sale at 421 Broome St. (the building where actor Heath Ledger tragically overdosed back in 2008).
Way downtown, 25 Park Row broke the record in the Financial District for the most expensive penthouse with a $25 million deal.
In Greenwich Village, titans of industry — including Chipotle founder Steve Ells, Facebook co-founder Sean Parker, Mets owner Steve Cohen and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. — spent the year combining townhouses worth tens of millions individually into megamansions worth far, far more.
“With New York coming back after the pandemic, buyers are settling downtown because they want to be immersed in a vibrant life with great restaurants around them and lots of people out and about,” said Compass agent Brett Miles.
But it was the billionaires moving blocks north that ruled the market.
Jeff Bezos — who made unfathomable sums this year as Americans had their lives delivered via Amazon — upped his stake at 212 Fifth Ave. in Nomad to $119 million worth of condos that constitute a palace-sized spread at the top of the historic tower.
Meanwhile, on Billionaire’s Row, Alibaba billionaire and Brooklyn Nets owner Joe Tsai scooped up a $157 million sky palace at 220 Central Park South in July — the largest residential sale of the year.
The heady Hamptons
Out east the records flowed like rosé.
The median home price in the Hamptons was already a staggering $1.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2020 — the highest on record and a 55% increase over 2019. But that figure nearly doubled to $2.4 million by the summer months of 2021, according to Douglas Elliman data.
“People are obviously looking to sell at the highest price possible, and I think the timing in 2021 … is excellent for everybody,” Mark J. Baron, a broker at Saunders told The Post. “That’s why you’re seeing the number of trades that we’re getting.”
The housing crunch — rental and sales inventory from Westhampton to Montauk essentially evaporated this year — led to a bulldozing bonanza, with more modest country escapes yielding to ostentatious mega-estates.
Among the biggest head-turning Hamptons deas of 2021 was Calvin Klein’s off-market $85 million sale of an 8.5-acre estate in East Hampton in August.
He originally purchased the property in 1987 for a measly $3.6 million. (This, a follow up to Klein’s off-market $84 million sale of his 7-acre Southampton property at 650 Meadow Lane to billionaire hedge-funder Ken Griffin in March 2020.)
But nothing topped the $145 million deal in Southampton when a 42-acre compound at 90 Jule Pond went into contract in March, making it the most expensive single-family home sale in Hamptons history.
How long will the erratic real estate ridiculousness last? Will Omicron yank us back into the early pandemic days and empty Manhattan?
Who the hell knows? All we can promise is that the ride isn’t over yet.
So give us your best “Auld Lang Syne” and buckle up for more stranger-than-fiction real estate shenanigans in 2022.
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