Revealed: The worst place to sell a home in NYC where homeowners lose a median $24K
New York City homeowners who sold their properties last year walked away with a median gain of $70,000 after taxes and fees, but that city-wide windfall masked a tale of two markets. Manhattan sellers posted losses while their outer-borough counterparts more than cleaned up, according to a new PropertyShark report.The analysis, which examined nearly 15,000 residential transactions from 2025 against original purchase prices dating back to 2005, found Manhattan was the only borough where the typical seller finished in the red, absorbing a median loss of $24,000.Meanwhile, sellers in every other borough pocketed meaningful gains, ranging from $95,000 in Queens and $98,000 in The Bronx to $159,000 in Brooklyn and a city-best $164,000 on Staten Island.PropertyShark analyst Eliza Theiss pointed squarely at the borough’s luxury pipeline as the culprit. “The short answer is the luxury condo boom,” she told The Post.“Starting around 2013, new ultra-luxury towers came online across Billionaires’ Row and into Lower Manhattan, pushing purchase prices beyond what the resale market would support.” “Sellers who bought into that wave, roughly 2013 onward, are struggling to sell above the line now,” she added. “59% of condos and 54% of co-ops in Manhattan resold at a loss in 2025, the weakest apartment performance of any borough.
The Financial District took the steepest neighborhood-level hit at $113,000, followed by Central Park South at $92,000.”Manhattan’s losses were concentrated entirely in its apartment stock.Condos recorded a median loss of $58,000 while co-ops lost $11,000. The borough’s handful of single-family and two- to three-family homes still generated strong returns, with single-family resales netting a median $739,000, but those property types accounted for fewer than 100 deals in the entire borough last year.When sellers bought also mattered enormously. Buyers who picked up their properties during the post-financial crisis recovery ye...