Sales are surging and prices are rising in the New York suburbs

First quarter sales in Westchester increased 7% YOY

Clockwise from bottom left: 224 Bay Ave in Glen Ridge New Jersey, 43 Stanford Place inGlen Ridge New Jersey, 50 Half Moon Bay Drive in Croton-on-Hudson and 79 North Mountain Drive in Dobbs Ferry
Clockwise from bottom left: 224 Bay Ave in Glen Ridge New Jersey, 43 Stanford Place inGlen Ridge New Jersey, 50 Half Moon Bay Drive in Croton-on-Hudson and 79 North Mountain Drive in Dobbs Ferry

The ‘burbs are back. Buyers in upstate New York and New Jersey are engaging in biddings wars to come away with suburban homes with easy access to Manhattan.

In Westchester County, for example, sales figures in the first quarter of 2017 jumped by nearly 7 percent year-over-year, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing data from brokerage Houlihan Lawrence. The median price also increased — rising by more than 5 percent to hit $570,000 in the first quarter.

It’s a similar story across New Jersey, where the monthly sales numbers have increased year-over-year for the past 2.5 years. On Long Island, sales in the third quarter of last year also hit a record high, and the median price went up nearly 5 percent in the last three months of 2016.

Rising interest rates and declining inventory is pushing more people to buy homes across the country, according to the newspaper. And with rents and sale prices rising in the city, locales further afield are becoming increasingly attractive to buyers.

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Homes at the lower end of the market, and properties in well-connected New Jersey enclaves like Montclair and Glen Ridge, are particularly sought after.

“The dynamic at the entry-level price point is very frothy,” Chris Meyers, the president of Houlihan Lawrence, which has agents in Westchester and in Fairfield County in Connecticut, told the Journal. “We could use some more sellers.”

In first quarter of the year, the overall median apartment sale price in Manhattan was $1.1 million, a 3 percent decline from last year.  In Brooklyn, the median hit a record $770,000, while the northwest Queens’ median hit $485,000. [WSJ]Miriam Hall