Professionals with young children are fueling a jump in Manhattan home sales, with widely available vaccines and a city turning toward a reopening enticing more New Yorkers to buy. These buyers are taking advantage of price discounts and low interest rates, renewing a commitment to New York life with the worst of the pandemic now likely in the past.
Many of these families spent part of the past year away from New York, where they sought roomier accommodations to work from home and where their children had their own spaces to study and play. A net of 70,000 residents left the New York metropolitan region over the course of 2020, according to estimates by location-analytics company Unacast.
But sales figures suggest that with most schools allowing in-person instruction and more workers trickling back into Midtown office buildings, families are coming back to the city with plans to stay.
Manhattan home-sales contracts for three- and four-bedroom homes increased 80% on an annual basis this February, according to a report from real-estate brokerage Corcoran Group. Neighborhoods where sales increased most include the Upper West Side and Midtown. The 1,164 new sales contracts were the most recorded by Corcoran during the month of February since at least 2013.
That was a dramatic turnaround after Manhattan co-op and condo sales fell more than 54% in the second quarter of 2020, right when home sales were beginning to explode in much of the rest of the country.
