About a quarter of all home sales in Manhattan last year involved the use of a trust, up from just 17 percent three years prior, according to the real-estate analytics firm Attom.
Photo: Alex Kent/Bloomberg/Getty Images
If you’re wondering who is buying a West Village co-op with tree- line views or a gut-renovated Soho loft these days, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve already guessed right: someone with a sizable trust. In 2024, 28 percent of all Manhattan home sales were purchased through a trust, up from just 17 percent three years ago, according to the real-estate analytics firm Attom. The stat, first reported by Bloomberg, is the latest data point to add some specifics to our ongoing Great Wealth Transfer, whereby $124 trillion is set to exchange hands over the next two decades. “When push comes to shove, someone who isn’t generationally wealthy probably cannot buy a property in New York City,” Andrew Schwartz, a Corcoran agent, told my colleague Madeline Leung Coleman in a story that more or less nailed this statistic a few months ago. (Schwartz also noted that in his seven years in the industry, not once has he worked with a first-time home buyer who managed to close on a property without any help from their parents.)
Some of the trusts being used here might be buyers scared off of LLCs (perhaps unnecessarily, it turns out!) over earlier transparency efforts at the state and federal level, but brokers and wealth-asset advisers told Bloomberg that parents covering the exorbitant cost of their kids’ first Chinatown walk-up is very much driving the increased prevalence of trusts in sales. That gels with Attom’s data that a third of the condos purchased with a trust were in trendy neighborhoods such as Soho, the West Village, and Tribeca. “In areas like the West Village, there used to only be older people who were wealthy,” Peter Zaitzeff, a Serhant agent, told the outlet. “Now, it’s all 20-year-olds whose parents bought them a place.”
And with the average Brooklyn condo going for $1.3 million and brownstones fetching nearly two and a half times that, you can be certain tax-savvy families are using the tool to help buy their children — and grandchildren — a little slice of Brooklyn Heights, too.