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 years, between 2009 and 2012, netted the strongest returns citywide at a median $206,000 upon selling last year. 

Those buyers had the advantage of purchasing at post-crash lows and riding historically low interest rates for years afterward. But gains compressed sharply for anyone who bought after 2012. 

Pandemic-era buyers who purchased between 2020 and 2023, right as prices spiked during COVID, walked away with a city-wide median of just $9,000 after fees.

For Manhattan apartment buyers specifically, the math turned negative starting with the 2013 to 2019 purchase cohort, who absorbed a median loss of $71,000 upon selling last year. That figure exceeded even the $43,000 median loss suffered by pandemic-era buyers in the borough.

Part of the problem was a dramatic divergence between what buyers paid for new Manhattan developments and what those units eventually fetched on the resale market. 

Between 2016 and 2019, the median sale price for new Manhattan residential developments was up to 16% higher than in 2025, at $2.89 million versus $2.41 million, while the median resale price in those same years was at most 2% above 2025 levels.

Of the 25 New York City neighborhoods that posted median resale losses, 23 were in Manhattan. 

The two outliers were Dumbo in Brooklyn and Glen Oaks in Queens, both heavily dominated by condos and co-ops that tracked closer to Manhattan apartment trends than to their surrounding borough markets.

The picture was starkly different across the East River and beyond. Brooklyn’s two- to three-family homes generated a median resale gain of $439,000, the strongest performance of any property type in any borough. 

Borough Park topped every neighborhood in the city at $409,000, followed by Fresh Meadows in Queens at $370,000 and Ocean Hill in Brooklyn at $366,000.

The report attributed Brooklyn and Staten Island’s outperformance in part to their sustained price appreciation, averaging annual increases of 4% over the past two decades versus 3% in the other three boroughs.

Staten Island stood apart as the most resilient market for recent buyers. Even sellers who purchased during the pandemic walked away with a median gain of $93,000 last year, far ahead of the next closest borough. 

The island’s near-total absence of co-ops and its limited new development activity over the past 20 years insulated it from the speculative condo dynamics that weighed down other parts of the city.

The Bronx offered its own quirk in the data. It was the only borough where buyers from the 2013 to 2019 luxury boom era actually outperformed the pre-crisis cohort, netting $118,000 versus $110,000. The borough largely sat out the new development wave that inflated prices elsewhere, leaving its resale market less exposed to the correction that followed.

Across all five boroughs, two to three-family homes were the most profitable asset class at a median gain of $324,000, more than 14 times the $22,000 median gain recorded by co-op sellers.