“I wasn’t ready to go,” said Nick Barnhorst, recalling what he felt in February. This 41-year-old city lover, a resident of the Big Apple for more than a decade, was already thinking of moving, but perhaps in a year and a half.
However, within a few weeks his wife became pregnant with her third child and the coronavirus devastated New York. Suddenly “everything indicated that we should get out of here as quickly as possible,” he said.
Next week, Barnhorst is due to sign a home purchase pledge in Mamaroneck, a small northern New York city.
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“I always felt like leaving would tear my heart out,” said this California native. “But today I can’t be more excited.”
A friend of Barnhorst’s who went to visit his in-laws in early March in Massachusetts did even something much more radical. He never returned to live in New York.
With his eight-month pregnant wife, he sold his apartment and bought a house in Bronxville, a commune immediately north of the Bronx district.
“Nothing that makes New York be New York It currently works, “Barnhorst stressed, because theaters, bars, cinemas, concert halls or museums have not reopened.” It is easier to leave it. “
In a booming property market that “leaves no room for negotiation,” Barnhorst had to scramble to find the house he wanted.
Near the city of Montclair, in New Jersey, there are properties that sell for more than 20% above the requested price, according to data from Richard Stanton, owner of the Stanton Realtors real estate agency.
“I did not expect such strong demand,” said this real estate agent, who expects supply to adapt to demand only in six months or even a year.
A resident of Darien, a Connecticut city, said he received several calls from potential buyers even though his house is not for sale. “This is the first time this has happened to me,” said this man who asked for anonymity.
New York City, the national epicenter of the coronavirus, registered more than 215,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus and more than 23,000 deaths since March, although the number of infections and deaths has decreased for weeks.
The telework factor
Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio regularly compare the current situation with what happened after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the other major trauma suffered by the city, and promise the same recovery.
But in real estate terms, the repercussions of the attacks “were anecdotal,” Stanton said.
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“After September 11, the pride of New Yorkers rather made me want to live in New York,” said Dillon Kondor, a guitarist who was a teenager at the time and lived in the city’s suburbs.
Kondor, who worked on several Broadway musicals, also left New York in June, and moved into an apartment in Tarrytown, in the Hudson River Valley.
He made the decision on one of the first sunny days of spring, during a walk with his wife through a Central Park crowded, where he felt that very few wore masks.
Upon returning “one of us said: you have to leave this city.”
Moving trucks swarm the streets of New York in July.
In southern Manhattan, more than 5% of the apartments are vacant, something never seen for 10 years, when the real estate firm Miller Samuel began publishing its statistics.
More than September 11, Stanton compares the current situation with the 2003-2005 period, when the rise in rents pushed many New Yorkers out of town.
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Also remember the 70s, marked by a degradation of public services and an increase in crime that led many to leave.
But this time, in addition to the coronavirus effect, “there is a heavier trend tied to the fact that there will be more people working from home,” Stanton said. In many cases “we will have a week in the shorter office.”
This move may calm the real estate fever in New York and allow a new generation to settle in a previously inaccessible city, the real estate agent imagines.
Dillon initially opted to rent while awaiting the reopening of Broadway theaters. But it’s hard for her to imagine back in New York. “There is so much uncertainty,” she says.
AFP
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