Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photos: Getty
After Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary this summer, some high-end real-estate brokers confessed to having something of a freak-out. Sure, they believed in the enduring appeal of New York and dutifully recited the mantra about how resilient the real-estate market was and how it had weathered any number of crises (9/11, the 2008 recession, COVID, the mansion tax) only to emerge stronger than ever. But they’d also seen clients depart or downsize to pieds-à-terre after the pandemic and were terrified that Mamdani’s win would make others do the same.
But in the months since, has a potential Mamdani victory actually impacted the residential real-estate market? Are wealthy New Yorkers doing anything beyond threatening to leave, as they so often do when there’s a leadership or policy change they dislike?
So far, brokers say, if there’s been any noticeable change, it’s been among buyers, who are hoping that a Mamdani victory will mean falling prices. One broker told me she has two clients in the market for $4 million–plus Manhattan apartments who are eagerly anticipating price drops after next week. Someone else knew buyers who were optimistic that a Mamdani win might finally be the thing to dampen the Brooklyn townhouse market. Broker Dolly Lenz, of Dolly Lenz Real Estate, offered a mostly fearmongering take on Fox’s Claman Countdown: “Imagine you own a townhouse in New York. He says he’s going to reduce police. You don’t want to be in a townhouse. You want to be in a doorman building, right?” The result, she predicted, would be a slew of townhouse listings.
Some buyers are even trying to jump the gun, underbidding in the hopes that a panicked seller might go for it: Keyan Sanai, an agent with Douglas Elliman, shared that a buyer had offered 18 percent under ask for his client’s one-bedroom in a doorman Nomad building — what he considered an opportunistic lowball. In an email, the buyer’s agent had noted “the uncertainty around the mayoral race” and suggested that “an all-cash, contingency-free offer like this one gives your seller certainty and speed, which is worth real value in this environment.” Sanai’s client wasn’t convinced and rejected it.
As for sellers, has anyone actually dropped their prices? “Obviously, there’s a lot of talk, but it’s just talk,” says Peter Zaitzeff, an agent at Serhant. “People are not packing up their lives and leaving. A lot of people have really low post-COVID interest rates. They’re definitely not selling.” Instead, he says, people are buying, and business is good: He just sold a $3.2 million apartment on Spring Street and a $1.9 million apartment on Lafayette, and a client who’s looking in the $18 to $20 million range is considering two different apartments, both with outstanding offers on them. If things get really bad in New York, the buyer told Zaitzeff that he’ll just wait things out at his place in the Hamptons. “With COVID, some people actually did move to Florida,” says Zaitzeff. “But then they realized you can’t live in Florida year-round. New Yorkers like to talk, they like sensationalism, but New York is New York.” Lindsay Barton Barrett, a Douglas Elliman associate broker who specializes in Brooklyn townhouses, also pointed out that most of the “fleeing New York” chatter got louder during the summer, when the market is dead anyway. As soon as the fall market picked up, it quieted down. A luxury broker who supports Andrew Cuomo said that, since the primary, much to her relief, things have been busy. “Plenty of people are buying right now.”
Melissa Leifer, an agent at Keller Williams NYC, said that what most buyers and sellers are waiting for more than the mayoral-election outcome is the end of Jay Powell’s term as the Fed chair next spring, after which, she says, Trump may appoint one of his cronies who’ll slash rates. “People who own here, they’re smarter than most people,” Leifer says. “They’re not going to be like, ‘Oh my God, Mamdani won! We gotta throw in the towel and sell.’” A few brokers did mention a rumor that was going around about a client who had put a Mamdani clause in their sales contract — if he won, they could cancel the contract. But no one could (or would) name the broker involved, and when I mentioned it to an anti-Mamdani broker, she cackled and told me it sounded like bullshit.
The only real Mamdani effect I heard of came from Zach and Heather Harrison, who lead a Compass team in Westchester. The suburban market has been bonkers ever since COVID, they noted, with far too little inventory for the number of interested buyers. Typically, though, fall is the quiet season — everyone wants to close in the spring or early summer, before school starts. But this fall, showings on Westchester single-family homes are up nearly 30 percent compared to June of this year, which is the traditional “go” time. And instead of calls requesting informational tours of different towns — which is what they usually get in the autumn, when buyers are looking to get their feet wet before jumping into spring sales — they’ve been inundated by calls from people desperate to buy now. They recently listed a fixer-upper four-bedroom in Scarsdale for $1.5 million. It’s nothing special — a standard-issue 1960s Colonial that’s been in the same family for the past 45 years and looks it. They had 75 showings in five days and fielded 24 offers. It went for $700,000 over ask.
However, they said that while Mamdani comes up a lot in conversations with buyers, no one is moving to the suburbs who wasn’t already planning to anyway. Instead, the Harrisons said, the frenzied fall atmosphere seems to be about something else: buyers afraid not so much of tax hikes or crime, but of other buyers fleeing to the suburbs if he wins. For a buyer trying to lock down a house in a notoriously competitive market like Rye or Chappaqua, the most terrifying thing about a Mamdani win is more competition.