The Covid-era rollercoaster — a buyer exodus, followed by a frenzied return and then interest rate hikes that froze the market again — has forever altered the real estate landscape in New York City. But not every neighborhood was affected equally.
Home prices in many of the city’s neighborhoods have gone up significantly since the pre-pandemic days of 2019, but in some areas, property values have actually gone down.
Of 180 neighborhoods across the city analyzed by The Real Deal, the majority (78 percent) had higher median home prices last year than in 2019 — some by remarkable amounts.
Hudson Yards saw the biggest jump. The average price there rose nearly 176 percent, from $1.6 million in 2019 to $4.3 million in 2022. Chinatown had the second biggest jump, rising nearly 129 percent from $753,500 in 2019 to $1.7 million last year.
Particularly notable is that nearly all of the rest of the top 10 gainers were neighborhoods in Queens. Clearview, nestled between Whitestone and the Clearview Park Golf Course just south of the Throgs Neck Bridge, saw median home prices more than double, from $380,000 in 2019 to $799,000 last year.
Waterfront neighborhoods on the Rockaway Peninsula — Hammels, the Rockaways and Arverne took the next three spots in the ranking with median home price increases 90 percent, 69 percent and 64 percent, respectively, albeit from relatively low 2019 prices, ranging from $425,524 to $534,000.
Home prices on Midtown Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue corridor, just south of Billionaires Row between Times Square North and the Plaza District, surged nearly 50 percent, from $995,000 in 2019 to nearly $1.15 million in 2022, to rank seventh on the list. Sunset Park, along the Brooklyn waterfront between Bay Ridge and Greenwood, saw its median price rise nearly 42 percent to top $1.1 million by 2022, grabbing the No. 8 spot among the largest increases.
The last two neighborhoods in the top 10 were also in Queens. Home prices in Broad Channel went up by just over 41 percent during the period, barely edging out Brookville, just east of John F. Kennedy Airport along the Belt Parkway, when the median price went up by just under that figure.
Overall, 28 Manhattan neighborhoods saw some rise in median home prices during the study period, and Brooklyn had 49 neighborhoods that saw a bump. But Queens was the big winner, home to 62 neighborhoods with higher median prices in 2022 than in 2019.
Boom bust
Rising home prices during the Covid boom era of rock-bottom interest rates aren’t terribly surprising, but in many New York City neighborhoods, home prices did not see a bump from 2019 to 2022. In some places, prices fell dramatically.
In nearly 22 percent of the neighborhoods TRD analyzed, median home prices were lower last year than before the pandemic. Prices dipped in eight Brooklyn neighborhoods and another nine in Queens. Manhattan had 22 neighborhoods that were worse off after the Covid boom than before it.
Brooklyn’s Vinegar Hill, nestled between Dumbo and the sprawling Brooklyn Navy Yard, registered a nearly 58 percent drop in median home prices over the course of the study period, albeit on the basis of a relatively small sample of just 17 home sales in 2019 and 10 last year.
The stretch of Park Avenue running between East 48th Street and East 59th Street saw home prices plunge by just over 56 percent.
Manhattan’s Civic Center, tucked between Tribeca and the Two Bridges area, saw home prices drop by over 55 percent. Meanwhile, Gramercy Park, bordered by Park Avenue South and First Avenue between East 14th Street and East 23rd Street, experienced a more modest 38 percent decline, rounding out the top five neighborhoods losing the most value between 2019 and 2022.
This is one of the hundreds of data sets available on TRD Pro — the one-stop real estate terminal for all the data and market information you need.
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For inquiries about how to obtain the underlying data set referenced in this story, email research@therealdeal.com