A single Manhattan home priced above $10 million entered contract during the week of July 6 through July 12, the worst showing for the city's trophy-home market since the last week of December, according to Olshan Realty's weekly luxury market report. In a city where brokers say three to five properties at that price tier normally go under contract each week, the collapse to one deal signals more than a summer lull.
The lone contract was a condominium at 1122 Madison Avenue with an asking price of $21.8 million. The next-priciest signed deal was a Chelsea condo asking just under $10 million. Below the trophy tier, 29 Manhattan homes priced at $4 million or more went into contract, 19 condos, six co-ops, and four townhouses, but 20 of those 29 involved homes asking less than $6 million.
The numbers tell a clear story: the very top of Manhattan's market is freezing while the tier just beneath it holds. And the brokers working those deals are pointing directly at the political climate created by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his administration's controversial pied-à-terre tax.
Victoria Shtainer, a Compass broker who works with international buyers and luxury condominium developments, told the New York Post the week's results caught the industry off guard.
"It was shocking in a really bad way."
Shtainer described a buyer class that is not panicking but is recalculating, weighing whether New York still makes financial sense for a second home or a high-end investment.
"I think the $10 million-plus buyer is an educated buyer. They really do their homework. They understand taxes, property tax. They have advisers. This is something that they're considering, and they're looking at New York as a whole. Is it friendly for the wealthy buyer or not?"
That question is not rhetorical. The pied-à-terre tax, which targets owners of luxury second homes in the city, has added a new layer of cost and uncertainty for the exact buyers who drive Manhattan's highest-end deals. Tax notices are set to go out August 30 to affected property owners, and the prospect of that bill arriving has evidently cooled enthusiasm well before the envelopes are mailed.
Shtainer acknowledged the seasonal factor but dismissed it as a full explanation. "Summers are slower," she said. "But not this slow."
Jonathan Miller, founder of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel, offered a more cautious read. He noted that the weakness at the top end tracks with what he observed across the entire second quarter, when the market above $10 million was down while the market just below that threshold was up.
"It's consistent with what we saw in the second quarter where the market above $10 million is down, but the market just below that is up. It's almost a shift in the mix."
Miller cautioned against reading too much into a single week's data, noting that seasonal patterns could be at play. "It's hard to say whether this is a trend," he said. "It's also the summer, and I wonder if it's just something seasonal that we're entering."
But Miller did not dismiss the tax explanation either. He stated plainly: "The pied-à-terre tax may be a driver of this pause." And he pointed to a geographic detail that complicates the seasonal theory. The same weakness, he said, is showing up in the Hamptons, a market he described as "joined at the hip with Manhattan." If both markets are softening simultaneously among the same buyer class, the cause is more likely structural than calendar-driven.
Miller noted that Wall Street compensation and tech-sector wealth remain strong, which makes the pullback harder to attribute to a simple lack of money. The New York Post reported that Miller found no specific evidence that wealthy buyers are leaving New York faster because of the current administration, but the pause in buying activity is real, and it is concentrated at the very price tier most exposed to the new tax.
Mayor Mamdani's name has become shorthand in real estate circles for a political environment that wealthy buyers find hostile. Brokers cited what they characterized as anti-wealth rhetoric from the mayor's office as a factor in buyer sentiment, layered on top of the tangible burden of the pied-à-terre tax itself. The Post reported that it sought comment from Mamdani's office but did not indicate a response had been received.
The mayor's tenure has generated a steady stream of controversies that extend well beyond tax policy. His administration stood by a scandal-linked political strategist tied to a failed Senate campaign, raising questions about the judgment of his inner circle.
That strategist, Morris Katz, drew enough backlash that the Democratic Socialists of America moved to blacklist him, a rare rebuke from Mamdani's own political base. The episode illustrated the kind of ideological turbulence surrounding City Hall that makes cautious investors nervous.
Mamdani's team has also drawn scrutiny for a planned meeting between a city official and Iran's UN ambassador that the State Department shut down, and for an aide who confronted ABC executives over on-air commentary about a socialist candidate. The pattern is one of an administration more focused on ideological posturing than on the signals it sends to the capital and talent that keep New York's economy running.
Separately, the mayor's top lawyer was found to be dating the congressional candidate Mamdani endorsed, adding another layer of insider entanglement to an administration that already struggles with public trust.
The Olshan Realty data paints a market that is splitting in two. At the $4 million-plus level, 29 contracts in a week is a functioning market. The $10 million-plus tier producing exactly one contract is not.
That split matters because the trophy tier generates outsized tax revenue, broker commissions, and downstream economic activity, from renovations to staffing to luxury retail. When the buyers at the very top step back, the effects ripple outward in ways that a healthy mid-luxury market cannot fully offset.
The pied-à-terre tax was sold as a way to extract revenue from wealthy non-residents who own expensive second homes in the city. But the early evidence suggests it may be doing something its architects presumably did not intend: discouraging those buyers from purchasing in Manhattan at all. A tax designed to collect more from the wealthy works only if the wealthy stay.
Several questions remain unanswered. The exact rate and implementation details of the pied-à-terre tax were not specified in the Post's reporting. Whether the 29 contracts at the $4 million-plus tier are above or below seasonal norms for the same week is unclear. And year-over-year comparisons for the trophy tier, which would show whether this week's result is an anomaly or part of a steepening decline, were not provided in the Olshan data as reported.
Shtainer's description of the $10 million-plus buyer as "educated" deserves attention. She was not flattering her clients. She was describing a decision-making process. These are buyers with tax advisers, estate planners, and portfolio managers. They read policy signals the way traders read earnings reports. And right now, the signals coming out of New York City Hall are telling them to look elsewhere.
That is the core problem with governing a city that depends on mobile wealth while treating that wealth as a political enemy. The ideological battles inside Mamdani's political orbit may energize his base, but they do nothing to reassure the people whose investment dollars fund the city's tax base, its construction industry, and its commercial real estate ecosystem.
Miller's observation about the Hamptons is particularly telling. If the same buyer class is pulling back in both Manhattan and the Hamptons at the same time, the common variable is not weather or seasonality. It is the political and tax environment of New York.
Florida, Texas, and other no-income-tax states have spent years courting exactly the buyers New York is now repelling. A pied-à-terre tax does not just add a line item to a closing statement. It sends a message about how a city views the people it is taxing. And the message New York is sending right now, to judge by the contract data, is being received loud and clear.
You can tax wealth, or you can attract it. New York is learning, one empty contract week at a time, that you cannot do both.