Long Island Home Prices Hit Historic Highs in 2020

LONG ISLAND, NY — Long Island home prices hit historic highs in 2020, which is great news for real estate agents and people selling their homes, but not so much for prospective home buyers.

The median sale price for homes on Long Island in 2020 was $515,000, up from $475,000 in 2019, according to OneKey MLS, the largest real estate listing service in New York. It was the first time in the more than 40-year history of the service that the median sale price for Long Island homes topped $500,000. The data includes home sales in Nassau County, Suffolk County and Queens.

Jim Speer, CEO of OneKey MLS said in a statement, “What’s interesting about the 2020 housing numbers, and what speaks to our market’s resilience, is that despite being off on the year-ending closed sales transactions, the number of yearly contracted sales on Long Island ended up 2.5 percent higher than in 2019."

He added, “It’s impressive that our Realtors recorded over 41,000 pending sales transactions during 2020, a year filled with so much uncertainty, and yet the housing market rallied and finished strong.”

Nassau and Suffolk counties reported gains in annual home prices attributed to the combination of record-low interest rates, limited inventory and the high demand for housing brought on by the influx of buyers moving from New York City amid the coronavirus pandemic. Nassau County reported a $575,000 median home price in 2020, 7.5 percent higher than the $535,000 median reported for 2019. Suffolk County reported a median home price of $445,000 in 2020, representing an 11.3 percent increase over the $399,900 median reported the year before.

While increased home prices are great for people selling their homes and real estate agents, it makes home ownership even more difficult for many. A 2019 report from the New York State Comptroller's office found nearly 40 percent of Long Islanders can't afford their homes, as they are spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing.