Opinion: Covid Changing the Faces of the Hamptons

Does it not seem everywhere you turn you hear about the record number of East End homes being bought. CPF numbers based on sales are setting new records. Friends who are real estate agents are very happy with business right now.

The funny thing I realized is that most of these homes are being sold to people who are not from the east end. In fact an area that takes pride in its heritage and founding families is now being inundated with a whole new population of folks perhaps trying to escape the dangers of Covid wherever they were living.

School enrollment is up as is traffic both in the villages and on the roads. There are people who are very happy with this development and there are other people who are concerned that their way of life that they love so much will obviously change.

I am curious to see how all of this influx will change the politics and the political leader ship of the east end if at all.

I can personally testify that in the Covid summer of 2020 there were more new boats and old boats out everyday in Gardiner’s Bay then any summer that I have experienced since 2007 and the great real estate bubble bursting.

Many had to witness the surge in bicycle traffic last summer. How many times did we wonder if the person riding the bicycle had actually been on one ever before. How many families did we see riding in groups; a site we usually don’t see so often all over the villages.

I am not making a judgment just an observation that big time change will be the result of the record amount of home sales in the last year or so. Also take any consideration that I do not know of a single home that was sold for less than what the owners had bought it for! My point being richer folks are moving in all over the East End and that will have some sort of long and short term effect. I don’t have the statistics like I used to have when I used to write a weekly real estate column for Dan’s Papers for a few years, so I am not sure how many homes are being purchased to live year-round in, or just as second homes or investment homes to rent. I just know that there’s a shuffling of the cards in the deck. So much so that you might say the game is about to be be played with a new deck of cards!