Apartments With Privacy, Home Offices And Outdoor Space Command Higher Prices In New York City

After largely spending the last several months at home, New Yorkers who are still in the real estate market have certainly had time to narrow down their priorities. And they are prioritizing privacy and home offices as much as outdoor space, a new report shows. 

The report from real estate market data firm UrbanDigs, commissioned by Forbes, shows that homes in New York that were described in listings using words and phrases such as “privacy,” or that had home office or outdoor space, saw much less price flexibility, and also saw much higher median sale prices.

For example, the median sale price of units with listings that include the word “privacy” nearly doubled, from $1.58 million in April 2019 to $2.9 million in July 2020.

Similarly, the median price for rare units with a private elevator nearly doubled while the listing discount fell, which is generally the opposite of what is happening in that price range, according to the report. 

For units with outdoor space, such as patios and terraces, the median price also doubled, from $1.7 million in August 2019 to $3.5 million in August 2020.

The rise of remote work has also affected the real estate market, and units offering a home office saw a doubling of their median price and a quick decrease in listing discount as the markets reopened, according to the report. The median price of a unit with a home office hovered around $1.3 million last spring and summer, jumping to $2.3 million in July 2020. 

Units described as “mint,” or move-in ready saw the median sales price jump from $1.3 million in July 2019 to $2.2 million in July 2020.

On the flip side, units referred to as “cozy,” a code word for small, saw the median sales price drop from $999,000 in June 2019 to $725,000 in June 2020.

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