In-state owners dominate the Hamptons

Once a cluster of quaint fishing and agricultural communities, the hamlets and villages that make up the East End of Long Island are now a summertime playground for the Northeast’s well-heeled.  

The average sale price for a home in the Hamptons went up a colossal 89 percent between 2013 and 2024, according to Miller Samuel’s appraisal data. To understand more about the people who hold the keys to this precious real estate, The Real Deal gathered and analyzed a large dataset of Hamptons properties using tax assessment records from two towns: East Hampton and Southampton, which span 20 hamlets and villages from Westhampton to Montauk. 

While some of the wealthiest buyers transact behind hard-to-track LLCs and shell corporations, it is possible to find the origins of many of Long Island’s East End owners. When stripped of LLCs and trusts, TRD’s dataset pinpointed the origins of the owners of more than 43,000 properties. 

The Hamptons may have a reputation that has spread far and wide, but the dataset reveals the owners of its hedge-fronted, hydrangea-trimmed homes to be a close-knit group.

Despite a global fixation on the area, especially over the past decade, the majority of the Hamptons remains in the hands of New Yorkers. Most Hamptons residences are second homes, with just 31 percent of properties appearing to be primary residences. East Hampton has the greatest population of owners for whom their property is a second home, at 77 percent. Southampton isn’t far behind, with 65 percent nonprimary owners. Some of these owners, however, may have a primary residence elsewhere in the Hamptons, data show.  

Almost all owners — 85 percent — in TRD’s dataset hailed from elsewhere in the Empire State.  Of the people for whom the Hamptons are a secondary residence, half have their primary addresses in New York City.

Of the vast majority who split their time between the Big Apple and the Hamptons, 88 percent live in Manhattan, and Manhattanites make up 26 percent of Hamptons owners overall.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those who split their time between the Big Apple and the Hamptons live in Manhattan — 88 percent — and Manhattanites make up 26 percent of Hamptons owners overall. Those from Brooklyn make up a more modest 3 percent of the East End set, or 10 percent of all New York City owners. The rest disperse among the outer boroughs: There are 98 residents from the Bronx who own Hamptons homes, 91 from Staten Island and just seven from Queens.

Westchester and Nassau counties furnish 3 and 5 percent of Hamptons owners, respectively.

Brokers familiar with the New York-to-Hamptons pipeline said that even within this concentrated group, birds of a feather flock together. House sales exceeding $20 million since 2023 are largely concentrated in Southampton, and many of the largest purchases can be traced back either to Manhattan or to other towns on Long Island. 

Manhattanites and Brooklynites mainly have addresses in Southampton, Bridgehampton and Water Mill. Non-New York City owners are more dispersed across the community.

Upper East Siders tend to flock to Southampton village, Bridgehampton and Water Mill, while Manhattan’s theoretically more laid-back Downtown crowd — from neighborhoods like Tribeca, Greenwich Village and Soho — can be found buying farther north, in the slightly less buttoned-up Sag Harbor, North Sea and Noyac, as well as in Sagaponack. 

Within certain neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, Hamptons homeowners cluster even more closely. The Real Deal identified three Upper East Side and Midtown East co-ops where more than two dozen residents own property in the Hamptons — 1185 Park Avenue, 500 East 77th Street and 425 East 58th Street. 

The building at 1185 Park Avenue topped the list. On Thursday afternoons, several neighbors from the fifth or 11th floors just might greet one another in the elevator with floppy hats and beach totes in tow. There are 33 people in the building—  20 percent of the residents — who own secondary homes in the Hamptons, almost entirely within the Southampton area. Six appear to summer just around the corner from one another in Water Mill, and two own homes on the same street in North Sea. 

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At 500 East 77th Street, 12 percent of the residents own Hamptons homes, and at 425 East 58th Street, 6 percent do. Both similarly skew toward Southampton. 

So are New Yorkers emailing Hamptons listings on their blocks to city neighbors or introducing favorite brokers to friends down the hall? Not necessarily, especially given the generally low inventory in the towns. 

Instead, where and when New York City residents buy in the Hamptons seem to be  largely a matter of convenience. In particular, the popularity of Southampton’s hamlets and villages is easy to understand when one is braving the traffic on Route 27.

A $35 million Southampton sale last summer went to a buyer from Park Avenue. This year, two properties on Gin Lane went to a Tribeca buyer for more than $88 million. One listing with a coveted Further Lane address went to a resident of Madison Avenue late last summer for $52 million. An outlier among the multimillion-dollar sales, a $28 million property in East Quogue, went to a buyer from Duxbury, Massachusetts.

The largest numbers of out-of-state owners come from New Jersey and Florida, but each of those states plays host to fewer than 3 percent of East End owners. Connecticut, California and Pennsylvania follow. Idaho, Mississippi and Nebraska are among the lonely states with just one Hamptons homeowner.

Greenwich, Connecticut, is the out-of-state spot with the most Hamptons property owners, at 124 properties, followed closely by Boca Raton and Palm Beach. The list descends through the usual suspects — Los Angeles, Miami Beach and New Jersey suburbs like Tenafly and Fort Lee, to name a few.

Despite increased out-of-town popularity, the allure of the Hamptons still reaches relatively few foreign buyers. Just 123 properties have owners with addresses outside of the U.S. Of those, nearly 50 percent count the United Kingdom as their primary residence. Then comes Germany, with 16 local owners, followed by nine Canadians, eight from Hong Kong and seven from Switzerland. A handful of Singaporeans and a single Tunisian owner enjoy summer by the Atlantic, too. 

Foreign-born owners usually buy here because they are connected in some way to New York City, through business or family, industry experts said.

The East End of Long Island remains a difficult world for outsiders to penetrate. In the Hamptons, that’s due to the astronomical home prices. But go slightly farther west in the Hamptons, or cross into the town of Riverhead, and the place remains a community of locals.

Eastport, Northampton and Flanders in Riverhead count locals — those for whom the home is their primary residence — as more than 60 percent of the population. The share is 50 percent in Hampton Bays and East Quogue. 

Some of these locals might previously have been second-homeowners, after some city dwellers abandoned their Manhattan apartments and moved out to the Hamptons full-time in 2020 and 2021.

Access the comprehensive data set supporting this story here. Put the power of real data in your hands with TRD Data.