Even in down years, Hamptons brokers usually manage to find a couple of $50-million-plus needles in the East End haystack.
While the summertime playground continued to have very low inventory, many of the area’s top-performing brokers still inked trophy deals in a market where one big sale is the difference between a banner year and a letdown.
“I just think there’s always demand for the best of the best, no matter the greater macroeconomic conditions,” said Trove Partners co-founder Michael Koeneke.
No team exemplified that principle more than Trove, a Compass affiliate that landed 11th in TRD’s broker rankings by dint of a single $112.5 million buy at 700 Meadow Lane in Southampton. The sale was the most expensive in the area since Barry Rosenstein’s $147 million purchase at 60 Further Lane in Easthampton in 2014.
Koeneke declined to comment on any specifics of the deal, but added that the “tremendous amount” of wealth in the Hamptons means demand will always exist for “best of the best residential assets.”
In total, the top 20 agents did $3.1 billion in sales across 349 transactions, for an average deal size of more than $8.7 million. The rankings are based on both buy- and sell-side transactions over $1 million between June 2023 and June 2024 from publicly available listings and data provided by brokerages.
The seller on the other side of 700 Meadow Lane, Bespoke Real Estate co-founder Cody Vichinsky, has been a perennial Hamptons kingpin, since he focuses exclusively on deals over $10 million. This year, he closed 26 deals for $717.5 million, landing at the top of TRD’s rankings for the second straight year.
Being a big-game specialist has helped insulate Vichinsky and his team from some of the market’s whims and generated a luxury-home flywheel effect.
“Developers have acknowledged that they're not going to hit home runs on these deals anymore.”
SAM KELLY, BESPOKE REAL ESTATE
“Our whole objective is to be able to have as much flow as we possibly can in that particular segment of the market and get as many relationships and transactions through the door that we possibly can,” Vichinsky said.
He had his prints all over the biggest deals of the last 12 months, serving as the listing agent for three of the five most expensive sales of the year and the buyer agent for two of the five (he served both sides of the Rose Hill Compound’s $65 million sale, along with teammate Sam Kelly).
Vichinsky said his work on 700 Meadow Lane helped secure him the listing for Southampton’s La Dune Estate, where the seller thought “we could translate a lot of the flow that we saw at 700 Meadow Lane over to this particular property.”
Vichinsky shared the listing with fellow Hamptons top guns Tim Davis of Corcoran, who ranked ninth, and Bruce and Harald Grant of Sotheby’s, a duo who came in at eighth place in the rankings. The property sold for $88 million in March after a January auction.
While the sale came in as the second priciest of the summer, it also came at a steep discount from the property’s 2016 asking price of $140 million after owner Louise Blouin entered the two homes on the estate into bankruptcy court.
Corcoran’s Susan Breitenbach, who placed 13th in the rankings with $97.7 million in sales, said that she enjoys working up and down the market and tries to bring the same attention to an “80-year-old widow that lost her husband and doesn’t have a lot of money” as to some of the Hamptons’ high rollers.
Right property, right price
Beyond the headline deals, it was a tale of two eras for brokers in the Hamptons.
In the final six months of 2023, the number of sales fell almost 4 percent year-over-year to 562, according to market reports from Miller Samuel. The full year of 2023 recorded 30 percent fewer sales than 2022.
A switch flipped in 2024, and brokers notched 679 closed deals over the first six months, a nearly 58 percent increase from the same period a year earlier. The high end of the market drove growth, as the share of homes sold for $5 million or over reached a new high of 16 percent in Q2 2024, said the report’s author, Jonathan Miller.
But the sales surge has yet to pull the market back to historic norms — the 451 deals in Q2 fell below the historical average of 522 for the quarter.
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The same good-not-great principle applied to inventory, which has risen over 20 percent to 1,173 since the start of 2024 but is still less than half the level of Q2 2019. Hungry buyers sucked up the steady rise in listings, contributing to falling months of supply in 2024.
Price skyrocketed to all-time highs as well, with Q2 2024 recording a median sale price of $1.9 million as inventory, despite beginning to recover, still lagged behind demand. While inventory increased over 20 percent at the start of 2024, months of supply fell in that same period as units coming online struggled to keep up with demand.
“Our supply is still very low, and our demand is still very high on certain products,” Hedgerow Exclusive partner Terry Cohen — No. 19 on the list — said.
Despite the frothy demand and sparse inventory pushing the median sale price to record highs, more than 70 percent of deals have transacted under the asking price in 2024. That number has been steadily ticking up since 2022, as sellers look back dreamily on the pandemic-era boom days.
“This year was really more about finding the correct number and letting the market kind of do the work,” Elliman’s James Keogh of the 13th-ranked Atlantic Team said.
Looking ahead
One of the big question marks from agents going forward is where the speculative sales market will land.
Bespoke’s Kelly said that he used to only deliver pro forma sheets to developers with estimated returns above 30 percent.
“Now developers have acknowledged that they’re not going to hit home runs on these deals anymore,” said Kelly, who finished seventh in the rankings with $129.4 million in sales. “They’re going to hit doubles, hopefully a triple, but in some cases, even a single and a half.”
High land prices and construction costs have stymied a formerly hot speculative market for the past year, but Hedgerow’s Cohen sees developers returning with a better understanding of where the market stands.
“We’re going to see some product coming out between the next 12 to 24 months,” Cohen said. “I think they were concerned about the land prices being high, the build prices being high — but what they didn’t realize was the price they can attain is high.”
Vincent Horcasitas, a Saunders agent who describes himself as the “developer’s broker,” said he’s already starting to see more new development product hitting the market Out East. Horcasitas, who placed 10th in the ranking with $123.8 million in sales, has a slate of new construction listings on his roster, including a $25 million estate on Rose Hill Road in Water Mill.
“New construction still drives the bus out here,” Horcasitas said.
Though the area has faced its fair share of market challenges over the last year, several brokers spoke to a Hamptons truism: More often than not, prices are going up and people are coming in.
“There’s challenges here and there; different things happen,” Breitenbach said. “But it always seems to be, people do want to be in the Hamptons no matter what.”
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—Sheridan Wall contributed reporting