NYC homeowners live in their homes an average of 8.1 years

Real estate

By Joyce Cohen

March 1, 2023 | 1:10 p.m.

How long do New York homeowners stay in their homes before selling?

A little over eight years old.

The statistics — from a new PropertyShark report covering all five boroughs — belie conventional pandemic wisdom that people are leaving town in droves. Last year, New York City landlords had a median occupancy length of 8.1 years, one year longer than the median ‘tenancy length’ of 7.1 years in 2019.

The analytical report shows that those living in small houses – dwellings of one to four families – stayed nine to ten years. Co-op owners sold out after about seven years.

Two- to four-family homes in the Bronx saw the lowest sales, followed closely by single-family homes in Queens and Brooklyn. These happy inhabitants stayed there for about 11 years.

The Staten Island owners had the shortest tenure — about five years.

“While it seems like the pandemic has caused everyone to move, expand or change their current home, there were actually more risk-averse homeowners than pioneers willing to just get up and go for a while. period of stress and uncertainty,” said the report, which covered sales for the past four years.

The slowdown in revenue could be due to the “golden handcuffs” phenomenon, the report said.

“While there will always be homeowners who will have to sell due to major life events forcing them to do so, most homeowners are quite reluctant to give up the 30-year fixed rate mortgages they have secured. when interest rates were at their lowest.

When it came to sales, home size didn’t matter much, except when it came to small homes in the Bronx. For homes under 500 square feet, owners have shown great stability, remaining nearly 22 years.

With respect to house age, the highest turnover occurred in houses less than five years old. The overall median seniority for these was 2.3 years. In Manhattan, that figure was just 1.4 years — perhaps because new homes can be starter homes, with people upgrading soon after for a growing family or a better job.

New York’s homeownership rate is among the lowest in the country. Many occupants of multi-family homes are tenants.

As for square footage, “generally, the larger the home, the more time homeowners spend in it before selling,” the report says. But in Brooklyn and Staten Island, smaller is better. Homeowners spent the least amount of time there in larger homes, possibly due to higher maintenance costs.

A similar analysis in California showed that owners in Elk Grove and nearby Sacramento stayed for less than 2.5 years on average. Those of Salinas, the agricultural center, stayed there for more than 9 years.

The number of transactions in the city has plummeted during the pandemic, with a low of 27,000 in 2020 and a high of 45,000 in 2021. Tenure is defined as the time between the most recent sale date and the previous sale date. Homes without at least one previous transaction were not included in the data.