Stock Market Has Home Buyers Scared to Sign Contracts

The Agency’s Michael Biryla thought he and his seller were in the clear.

The potential buyer had already completed an inspection and hammered out negotiations on the contract for the $3 million Upper East Side listing. Then came the call from the buyer agent: the deal was off.

“Last night, I got a call from the broker, and they were like, ‘Yeah, we aren’t comfortable moving forward anymore,’” Biryla said. “Their [client’s] portfolio is down like 30 percent, they said, so they’re just terrified to pull that money now because they’re just going to take a huge loss.”

Multiple agents, lawyers and mortgage brokers in New York say buyers are getting cold feet during one of the worst market downturns in recent history. President Trump’s tariff announcement, which included taxes exceeding 50 percent for some countries like China, triggered a market sell-off that ran from Thursday through Monday.

The S&P 500 fell nearly 10 percent that period— a steeper decline than any three-day period during the early days of Covid, nearly outpacing the largest three-day drop during the financial crisis in 2008. The fall in prices wiped out over $6.6 trillion in market value, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The hit to asset values, as well as the cloud of uncertainty hanging over the market, have spooked buyers to the point that some are backing out of both accepted offers and signed contracts.

Data from UrbanDigs shows that the percentage of canceled New York contracts spiked to over 1 percent last week, compared to an average of .5 percent over the last three years. Compared to total contract volume, the numbers are still relatively small but speak to broader market concerns, co-founder John Walkup said.

“There’s a base level that you can just attribute to — there’s something wrong with the property or the financing or whatever it is that sort of flows through the background,” he said. “But this extra level, it would be sort of difficult to say it has nothing to do with the macro environment backdrop.”

Peter Zinkovetsky, managing attorney at Avenue Law Firm, said he’s received two requests from buyers in the past 48 hours to pull out of contracts. One asked for the 10 percent wire deposit to be returned while they tried to negotiate a new price with the seller.

“A lot of clients whose closings are coming up just lost like 20 to 25 percent of their liquidity on paper from the time that they’ve applied for a mortgage,” he said. “There are definitely going to be deals which will have to get canceled or buyers that will go into default if they don’t have a mortgage contingency, because they won’t be able to get a mortgage.”

Buyers hunting for homes are also telling agents they now need to pause their search. Coldwell Banker Warburg’s Rashi Malhotra had a buyer that was planning to liquidate their company stocks in April but now can’t because of the losses they would incur.

Instead, they’re continuing to rent after a six-month search.

“It’s really unfortunate,” Malhotra said.

Luxury spared, for now

The luxury market, perhaps thanks to its wealthy cash buyers, appears to have avoided some of the chaos.

Shaun Pappas, a partner at law firm Starr Associates, said the dozens of luxury deals his group does every week have yet to be affected.

In fact, buyers with cash to spare or who are tired of the marketing volatility might see real estate as a welcome port in the storm, said Douglas Elliman’s Fran Katzen. “When you have volatility, people want to dump their equity into a much more consistent, slow-performing asset — real estate,” she said.

Katzen had a buyer cash out on $2.8 million in cryptocurrency on Friday and Monday to fund an upcoming deal, despite crypto markets also suffering in recent days.

Boston-based luxury developer Gaetano Morello is putting the finishing touches on a brownstone reconstruction that he expects to price around $15 million. He said he’s not concerned about the buyer pool flinching at the price, even if it needs to increase from tariffs hitting some of the European stone tile or French ranges.

“The ultra-high-end real estate market is relatively inelastic, given the amount of wealth that exists out there,” he said.

Still, some luxury buyers are starting to reconsider.

Melissa Cohn, regional vice president at William Raveis, had a client postpone closing on an all-cash deal for a multi-million dollar Hamptons home. She said he’s waiting to see if the value of Hamptons real estate is going to drop significantly more than his 10 percent deposit.

For agents like Biryla, who are already getting burned by market-sensitive buyers, it’s back to the drawing board. The two other offers, both lower than the accepted bid, had already moved on to different properties, he said.

The plan going forward: “Reset the marketing plan, blast out to every person that hasn’t seen it, try to reach out to other brokers, try to reposition the property, maybe do a slight price adjustment.”