On a recent post in r/realestateinvesting, a New York City resident asked their Reddit peers: “Manhattan real estate investment, is it still worth it?”
The answer for many condo buyers in the last decade has mostly been “no,” according to a report from Brown Harris Stevens. The firm analyzed over 2,500 condo resales from July 2024 and July 2025 and found that one in three units sold during that time went for a loss.
Sellers who bought between 2016 and 2020 were hit the hardest, with more than half of those that sold in that last year suffering a loss. The vast majority of the more than 700 buyers from before 2010 that sold in the last year saw price appreciation.
For those tracking Manhattan pricing over the long term, the results may not come as a surprise. From 2016 to 2024, the average price per square foot for a Manhattan condo has fallen by 4 percent, according to Miller Samuel report for Douglas Elliman.
“I don’t think the public is completely aware of the fact that housing prices in Manhattan for the last decade have been relatively flat,” said report author Jonathan Miller.
The extended time horizon captures several inflection points that have shaped the Manhattan market.
The precedent to the lackluster resales was a period of “super normal growth” from 2013 to 2015, according to Brown Harris Stevens managing director Jared Antin, before a surge in pricing “almost overnight.” From 2015 to 2016, median condo sale prices increased over 10 percent, according to Elliman’s 10-year market report.
“There was a lot of extrinsic pressure to buy, because you had this FOMO that if you didn’t buy, prices were going to run away,” Antin said. “That led people to make some potentially less than savvy purchase decisions.”
As condo projects came to market, a slew of state and local policies dampened the city’s appeal for wealthy buyers.
The introduction of the cap on state and local tax deductions in 2017 disproportionately focused on New Yorkers, who were subject to deductions nearly double that of the next highest county in the country. Two years later, the city implemented a progressive mansion tax to replace its flat 1 percent tax on home sales. The mansion tax can stretch as high as 3.9 percent for the city’s most expensive homes.
Both policies imposing steeper costs for high-end homebuyers, but the luxury market has seen the most consistent price appreciation. Just 20 percent of the homes in the study that sold for at least $10 million sold for a loss, and for homes bought from 2016 to 2020, the luxury segment was the only one to see price appreciation.
“You’re rich and you’re buying because you want it,” Antin said of the luxury market’s resilient buyers. “You don’t really care about what’s happening around you.”
New York lost wealthy would-be buyers to low-tax, warm-weather states. From 2018 to 2022, roughly 125,000 New Yorkers moved to Florida and the percentage of millionaires living in the state fell to 8.7 percent from 12.7 percent from 2010 to 2022, according to a Citizen’s Budget Commission report.
The trend cooled as the post-pandemic housing boom and skyrocketing insurance costs made South Florida a more expensive destination.
The stock market’s unprecedented run over the last five years has also kept money out of New York real estate as investors have watched their bank accounts grow, but fears over a looming market correction have become more pervasive.
“There’s a lot of interesting pieces that are happening here that could help buoy the purchase market,” Antin said.
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