Million-Dollar Homes Are Taking Over This Borough, Report Shows

BROOKLYN, NY — Kings County is starting to live up to its name — at least when it comes to real estate. Million-dollar home sales have exploded in Brooklyn over the past decade, a recent report shows, indicating Manhattan no longer has a monopoly on luxury properties.

The real estate listing website PropertyClub examined how each borough's market for homes priced at more than $1 million has changed over the past 15 years using city Department of Finance data. The Feb. 15 report incorporated sales of condos, co-ops and single family homes.

The figures illustrate Brooklyn's boom over the past 10 years. The number of million-dollar sales recorded there increased almost eightfold from 208 in 2009 to 1,663 last year, the report shows.

The amount of money those sales are worth has increased even more sharply to more than $3 billion in 2018, more than eight times 2009's sales volume of about $382.7 million, according to the report. The borough's market appears to have peaked in 2017, when there were nearly 1,800 sales with a volume of over $3.4 billion.

The big increase has coincided with economic growth in Brooklyn. The borough posted its seventh straight year of strong job growth in 2016, when its population hit about 2.63 million, and the unemployment rate sunk to a historic low of 4.9 percent in June 2017, according to a Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce report.

High-end homes are also on the rise in Queens. The borough saw 739 million-dollar sales last year — more than seven times the 99 recorded in 2009 — and its sales volume broke $1 billion in both 2017 and 2018, the report shows.

Both outer boroughs' luxury markets pale in comparison to Manhattan's, where there were 4,156 million-dollar sales recorded in 2017 with a staggering volume of more than $15.2 billion, according to PropertyClub.

But Manhattan's market has seen more flucutation since the early 2000s, according to the report. It was also particularly hard by the 2008 recession, the report says, with its million-dollar sales volume dropping by more than $6 billion from 2008 to 2009.

"It wasn’t until 2014 that one million dollar plus sales saw numbers bounce back to pre-recession levels, with all boroughs seeing surges in million dollar sales," the report reads. "While Brooklyn and Queens show signs of continued growth in this segment it remains to be seen whether boroughs like the Bronx and Staten Island can sustain the trend as they are both already showing signs of a slowdown."

Take a look at the chart below to see how the high-end real estate market has changed in your borough, or read PropertyClub's full report here.