The US housing slump has arrived at the Hamptons, summer playground of the Manhattan elite. Financial Times
In a sign that falling prices and home sales gluts are no longer limited to the nation’s declining rust-belt cities or bubble markets, prices for gilt-edged properties in East Hampton and Southampton have fallen sharply.
The Long Island resort towns, among the wealthiest and most well-connected in the US, experienced a boom between 1998 and 2007 when home values quadrupled.
The three-month running median sales price of single family homes in the two towns fell 19.2% to $638,600 (€400,000, £320,000) between December and February, according to Suffolk Research.
That is almost as much as the 19.3% drop in home prices that Miami and Las Vegas, where the boom and bust in the housing markets has been most dramatic, suffered in the whole of last year, according to the S&P Case-Shiller house price indices.