City real estate firms are paddling northward into the Hudson Valley to catch a piece of the rising market, where houses are getting pricier, though not nearly as quickly as those on their home turf.
Halstead Property in late June opened an office in the city of Hudson, about 120 miles north of Manhattan, making it the first major city firm to hang out a shingle in the counties along the Hudson River, slightly east of the Catskills. The valley is still fertile ground for low home prices low by Gotham standards, anyway and lots of open space, all accessible via the Taconic State Parkway and Metro North trains.
But what exactly is the Hudson Valley to a New York broker? And if it’s been there for decades, why plant a flag there now?
“For a couple of reasons,” said Robin Horowitz, a senior vice president in Halstead’s Downtown office who, along with her sister Nancy, directs the new Upstate office. (Both sisters, Manhattan natives, own homes in the valley.) “The first is it’s accessible and affordable for people from Manhattan.”
The second reason, said Horowitz, is that the Hudson Valley is not the Hamptons.
“The Long Island Expressway for many years was impossible,” she said. “Now, it’s a nightmare. I used to have a house out there and, typical of many buyers, I used to dread Thursday nights getting on that parkway.”
Part of the charm of the Hudson Valley is that it’s far less expensive than the eastern tip of Long Island or the western tip, for that matter.
In May, when the average price of a Manhattan apartment stayed above $1 million, the median price of a single-family home in Rensselaer County, four hours north, was $144,000, according to the New York State Association of Realtors.
In Putnam and Dutchess counties, just north of Westchester, the median price of a single-family home was $380,000 on average.
(Upstate’s allure for city brokers extends west of the Hudson as well. Catskills real estate broker Frank Lumia opened an office on North Moore Street in Tribeca likely the first Upstate broker to open a storefront in Manhattan around the same time as Halstead opened its new office. He only markets properties in the Catskills, according to New York magazine.)
For Manhattan brokers interested in cracking the Hudson Valley market, the challenge is not necessarily convincing people to relocate to far-flung suburbs and beyond. The key to an adapted urban sales pitch is more about touting the affordability and pleasures of a second home or a first home for commuters who’ve been priced out of the city in the boom market.
“The average age of our buyers is probably in the 30s,” Horowitz said of Halstead’s Hudson Valley clients. “Also, what Nancy and I found working in the city all those years is a lot of people not necessarily after September 11, but coinciding with September 11 started putting their investments as ‘I’ll put X-amount in the city and X-amount outside the city.'”
Roughly 1.5 million people live year-round in the valley about the population of Manhattan or the Bronx.
The price of the land valley residents live on has increased about 100 percent annually for the last five years, according to Horowitz.
Median sales prices continue to rise as other Upstate counties, especially in western New York, experience declines. In Columbia County, for instance, the median sales price of a single-family home jumped 46.5 percent from May 2003 to May 2005.In Ulster, the two-year spike was 42 percent, according to NYSAR.
Operating outside of a franchise operation allowed Halstead to catch a piece of the still roiling Hudson Valley market ahead of competitors such as Prudential Douglas Elliman and the Corcoran Group, Horowitz said. The move may presage forays into other northern markets.
“We’re the last of the major brokers in the city that aren’t franchises now,” Horowitz said. “We can expand our market without any restraints, and maybe capture Connecticut, Massachusetts and a whole market that wouldn’t necessarily be exposed to a New York City broker.”