The Hamptons is having a rough time these days.
The lavish retreat for stressed-out, big moneyed New Yorkers has hit a bit of a rut. Home prices are pretty far down (I mean, a mansion listed for $5.8 million sold for $2.75 million just a few months ago), and people keep breaking in to Diddy’s (that is his name today, right?) Hampton home and eating his food.
Hard life these Hampton-ites live.
But it turns out the market is going back up. On the heels of big bankers not getting their bonuses and a gloomy financial environment that sent the luxury beachside digs into real estate lows, sales are starting to inch back up.
“The enthusiasm of the buyers is something we haven’t seen in years,” said Pamela Liebman, president of Corcoran Group Real Estate, told Yahoo. “We still have a lot of unrealistic sellers, but they’re beginning to come down and meet the market.”
Rich people always want what they can’t have, and that will be just as true later this summer when there are fewer homes for sale. The overabundance of homes for sale in East Hampton will send the homes into the hands of eager (and comparably cheap) buyers, leaving prices high for those who really want the luxury of living on one America’s most posh beachfronts.
So who are these bargain shoppers? On top of the sort-of millionaires that can now afford property there, the Hamptons has also seen a large increase in foreign buyers, mostly from Britain, Russia and South America. The Village Latch, for instance, is on sale for $19 million and a recent perspective buyer emerged in the form of an all-cash bid from a Chinese woman married to a British financial industry titan.
Hopefully these sales will push these East Hampton sales numbers up, because it turns out that its (lowly) neighbor Southampton is catching up. And, well, we can’t have that.
