Foundational Report · July 2026
Heather DomiManhattan luxury has traditionally been measured one way: anything above a single price point, like $4 million or $5 million, gets called “luxury.” That's a bit like the owner of two restaurants averaging the checks between his diner, where the average meal runs $50, and his Michelin-starred restaurant, where it runs $400. The average tells you nothing true about either one.
In reality, the Manhattan luxury market is three separate buyer pools moving on different cycles. Domi Data™ Luxury Lines splits the market by percentile instead: Luxury is the top 10% of Manhattan contracts, Prime is the top 5%, and Trophy is the top 1%. We call these three tiers the Luxury Lines.
The Luxury Lines methodology is built on contracts signed. Part II is the one exception, using closed sales to look at the full decade. A signed contract is the earliest sign of where the market is heading. A closed sale doesn't show up until 60 to 90 days later, once the deal has worked its way through the system. The market has historically been tracked through closed, sold contracts, with only anecdotal weekly reports, the kind an MLS-style market update gives you, on what was actually getting signed.
Every signed contract in Manhattan has been recorded since the second quarter of 2021. This report is the first to build that signal into a full methodology. It's also why this report's signed-contract methodology covers five years and not ten: signed-contract records simply don't exist before Q2 2021, for any data provider. That's a hard limit built into the data itself. Nobody chose to leave it out. Where this report needs a longer view, Part II (The Decade) reaches back a full ten years on a different dataset: closed sales, which the public record has tracked all along, without that Q2 2021 start. It's the one section built on that older baseline, used deliberately to check pricing against a decade of inflation instead of five years of it.
This report tracks all three tiers across the last five years, from the twelve months ending June 2022 through the twelve months ending June 2026, to show how each tier's position, and your leverage within it, has shifted.
The Luxury, Prime, and Trophy floors are recalculated every week from the trailing twelve months of all Manhattan signed contracts, and published exclusively on heatherdomi.com. Each floor always represents the same share of the market, the top 10%, top 5%, or top 1% of actual activity, whatever dollar amount that happens to be right now. When the market prices up, the floor rises with it. When it corrects, the floor falls.
A static dollar floor measures a different share of the market every cycle, without ever saying so. Here's what that looked like in practice: the Luxury floor stood at $4.51M for the twelve months ending June 2022, while that window still carried 2021's hot run. By the twelve months ending June 2023, once the 2022 downturn had worked through that same window, it had eased to $4.46M. A static $4M floor would have missed the real cutoff both times: by $510K in the first period, and $460K in the second. That gap barely moved, but don't read too much into it: a trailing twelve-month window blends a cycle's hot start with its cooling into one average, so it smooths out swings rather than tracking them in real time. The percentile approach still finds the correct cutoff either way, because each period's floor is calculated fresh from that period's own trailing market. A static number never adjusts at all.
Part III (Five-Year Cycles) holds one floor fixed across all 21 quarters it covers, on purpose. A floor that moved every quarter would break every metric that depends on it: contract counts, dollar volume, active listings, months of supply, median price, and price per square foot. Each one would be reacting to two moving parts at once, the market and the cutoff, with no way to tell them apart. That fixed floor is today's percentile cutoff. It resets to a new current figure every time this report runs, so the comparison always starts from where the market stands today.
The floor itself moving over time is a signal in its own right. When it rises, buyers are pushing higher to compete for the same pool of listings. When it falls, that pressure is letting up. Tracking it over years shows whether luxury pricing is keeping pace with inflation, or moving on its own logic entirely, and how it responds to forces that have nothing to do with Manhattan real estate at all: a rate-hike cycle, a pandemic's stimulus, a record bonus season putting fresh capital in buyers' hands. Part II (The Decade) tracks the first question against ten years of inflation. Part III (Five-Year Cycles) shows the second and third in real time.
These percentile floors update weekly on heatherdomi.com, so the figures above always reflect today's top 10%, 5%, and 1% of Manhattan contracts.
| Period | Luxury (Top 10%) | Prime (Top 5%) | Trophy (Top 1%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 2022 | $4.51M | $6.92M | $15.00M |
| Jun 2023 | $4.46M | $6.61M | $14.68M |
| Jun 2024 | $4.70M | $6.99M | $18.00M |
| Jun 2025 | $5.02M | $7.56M | $18.04M |
| Jun 2026 | $4.95M | $7.23M | $18.23M |
Source: Data Powered by Marketproof.
Which floor you're transacting at determines whether today's market gives you room to negotiate. Luxury ($4.95M) and Prime ($7.23M) have both eased slightly off a peak reached in the twelve months ending June 2025. That's the first give either tier has shown since it bottomed out in the twelve months ending June 2023, a real opening if you're shopping there. Trophy ($18.23M) shows none of that: its floor has climbed every period since that same 2023 low, with no pullback, and now sits at its highest point in the five-year series. Part III (Five-Year Cycles) shows Trophy deal volume slowing in early 2026 even as its price floor keeps climbing. Trophy pricing itself hasn't softened at all. See Part III for that count, and Part VI (Cost Inflection) for how that timing compares to the pied-à-terre surcharge.
With the three tiers defined, the next question is how each has performed over time.
Ten years of closed sales. Luxury up 5.1%. Prime up 3.8%. Trophy up 11.9%. All three tiers fell hard in 2020, then spent years climbing back. None of them have reclaimed their own decade high yet. Nothing else that touched this market over the same ten years stayed this flat.
This is the one section built on closed sales rather than signed contracts. Closed-sale records reach back a full ten years. Signed-contract records only begin at Q2 2021 (see Part I). Closed prices lag signings by 60–90 days on average. That lag doesn't matter here: this section is measuring structural price movement across a full decade. Each figure below is a trailing-twelve-month (TTM) read ending that June, and every closed sale behind it is cross-checked against ACRIS, New York City's public deed-recording system.
| Period | Luxury (Top 10%) | Prime (Top 5%) | Trophy (Top 1%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| TTM Jun’16 | $4.29M | $6.62M | $15.55M |
| TTM Jun’17 | $4.66M | $7.18M | $16.52M |
| TTM Jun’18 | $4.25M | $6.63M | $15.01M |
| TTM Jun’19 | $4.61M | $7.07M | $17.83M |
| TTM Jun’20 | $3.54M | $5.42M | $13.00M |
| TTM Jun’21 | $3.89M | $5.79M | $13.67M |
| TTM Jun’22 | $4.15M | $6.34M | $14.97M |
| TTM Jun’23 | $4.37M | $6.50M | $15.60M |
| TTM Jun’24 | $4.16M | $6.24M | $14.99M |
| TTM Jun’25 | $4.45M | $6.60M | $16.51M |
| TTM Jun’26 | $4.51M | $6.87M | $17.40M |
| Decade change | +5.1% | +3.8% | +11.9% |
Each column above is a genuine trailing twelve months ending June 30 of that year, the same construction Parts I, III, IV and V use for their own TTM tables, applied here to ten years of closed sales instead of five years of signed contracts.
All three tiers fell roughly 15–18% in the twelve months ending June 2020, the steepest one-year move anywhere in this ten-year span. It took until TTM Jun’23 for Luxury, TTM Jun’25 for Prime, and it still hasn’t happened for Trophy as of TTM Jun’26, to work back toward where each tier had already been years earlier. It now costs 50.2% more to build a Manhattan trophy residence than it did in 2016, and developers don't have a choice but to pass that cost on, or they can't build at all. The trophy resale market moved only 11.9% over the same stretch, and now sits within 2.5% of its own TTM Jun’19 high.
That gap is the value signal. Existing trophy inventory is transacting below what it would cost to build the same thing new today, and below its own decade high.
Luxury rose 5.1% in ten years. Prime rose 3.8%. Trophy rose 11.9%. All three cratered roughly 15–18% in the twelve months ending June 2020, then spent years climbing back. None have reclaimed their own decade high. Luxury and Prime peaked in TTM Jun’17. Trophy peaked in TTM Jun’19. Construction costs rose 50.2% and NY metro inflation ran 31.8% across the same ten years. Priced against what it costs to build new, and against where each tier has already been, Manhattan luxury is trading at a discount.
Zooming in from that decade-long view, this section looks at how the market moves quarter to quarter.
From Q2 2021 through Q2 2026, 21 consecutive quarters, Luxury, Prime, and Trophy have moved as three distinct markets, each with its own buyers and its own pace. Contract counts swing hard by season and by cycle. Median price, as the chart below shows once you click into the “Median Price” view, has moved far less.
Q2 2021–Q2 2026, 21 quarters: signed contracts above each tier’s current percentile floor, held fixed across the series. Same signed-contract coverage as Part I, starting Q2 2021. This 21-quarter window is the complete available dataset; pre-2021 analysis uses closed-sale records (see Part II).
Every year in this five-year window, Q3 was the softest quarter, and every year, price held. Coming off Q4 2021's record 441 Luxury contracts, the Fed's rate-hike cycle (the 30-year mortgage moved from 3.65% to 6.49%) cut activity hard: Luxury contracts fell 65% and Trophy fell 81% over the next three quarters, all the way down to just 6 Trophy deals in Q3 2022, this report's most extreme quarter. But at Luxury and Prime, median price moved far less than count did, down only 4.5% and 4.8% off that same Q4 2021 baseline, nowhere near the scale of the volume drop. Trophy's own median that quarter (up 2.1%, on just 6 contracts) isn't a reliable read either way; that small a sample can't support a real price conclusion in either direction.
The pattern holds across the whole five years, and it isn't just a 2022 story: contract counts and dollar volume swing hard by season and by cycle, but median price has stayed remarkably steady the entire time. This section is about when deals happened and how many, separate from whether prices rose or fell.
The year-by-year read above only shows whichever quarter happened to peak that particular year, which can make the pattern look more random than it is. This is the more reliable version: it separates the real seasonal pattern (Q2 strong, Q3 weak, every year) from one-off events like the 2022 rate shock. The result is four numbers, one per quarter, showing how that quarter typically performs relative to the other three. It's also worth noting that each year's strongest quarter often lines up with a broader event, a rate move, a tariff announcement, a geopolitical flare-up, so quarterly strength usually has a real cause behind it. These four numbers are the Domi Data Luxury Lines' seasonal index for Luxury, Prime, and Trophy.
Q2 is consistently this market's busiest quarter, and Q3 is consistently its softest, for Luxury and Prime alike, every year in this five-year window. Whether that's good or bad news for you comes down to how you feel about competition.
Either way, timing shapes your outcome as much as price does.
| Period | Luxury+ Contracts | Luxury+ Volume | Prime+ Contracts | Prime+ Volume | Trophy+ Contracts | Trophy+ Volume | Trophy+ % of vol |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 2022 | 1,374 | $12.9B | 704 | $8.9B | 96 | $2.6B | 20% |
| Jun 2023 | 891 | $8.4B | 436 | $5.7B | 64 | $1.8B | 22% |
| Jun 2024 | 920 | $9.7B | 458 | $6.9B | 91 | $3.0B | 31% |
| Jun 2025 | 1,153 | $11.6B | 578 | $8.2B | 108 | $3.2B | 27% |
| Jun 2026 | 1,082 | $11.1B | 538 | $7.9B | 107 | $3.2B | 29% |
Prime and Trophy contracts are also counted inside Luxury; a contract in a higher tier automatically counts in every tier below it too.
Every tier moves differently by quarter. It also moves differently by neighborhood.
This section looks at where Manhattan's luxury dollars actually concentrate: which neighborhoods carry the market, and what happens when a neighborhood's rise turns out to be temporary.
Click a metric to re-sort and relabel the table.
Twelve neighborhoods are shown here, more than the top 10, because the top 10 wasn't identical every year: eight neighborhoods held a top-10 spot by dollar volume in all five years, while Greenwich Village, SoHo, Carnegie Hill, and Yorkville moved in and out. The two currently sitting just outside the top 10 by this year's volume, Carnegie Hill and Yorkville, are shaded below to mark them as borderline rather than a clean part of the top 10.
| # | Neighborhood | Jun 2022 | Jun 2023 | Jun 2024 | Jun 2025 | Jun 2026 | YoY Δ | 4-Yr Δ | Yrs Top 10 (by vol.) |
|---|
† Chelsea and West Chelsea are tracked as distinct neighborhoods.
The top 10 neighborhoods above captured 72–85% of Manhattan's luxury dollar volume every year since 2022. That range moves year to year rather than holding to a fixed ratio, but it's always the large majority.
This report's neighborhood-level analysis is built around these top 10 neighborhoods. Outside of them, luxury activity is too thin and fragmented to support a reliable read on patterns. The top 10 neighborhoods are where luxury contracts happen every year, which makes them the best data set for drawing reliable conclusions.
This chart shows each neighborhood's own trajectory over time. Tribeca's dollar volume and count are larger than Yorkville's throughout. See the main table for that comparison.
Tribeca is what a healthy, concentrated top-10 luxury neighborhood looks like. It's held a top-10 spot by dollar volume every year since 2022, comfortably and consistently. A large share of everything that sells there is luxury-tier, in a neighborhood of only about 21,300 residents (2020 Census, NYC Dept. of City Planning).
Yorkville is the opposite case. It made the top 10 once, in 2022, then dropped out and never came back. Contract activity is down 80% from that last year in the club, 96 contracts to 19. The Second Avenue Subway's construction brought a wave of new development to Yorkville, and buyers bought into it, temporarily lifting the neighborhood's numbers. Once that wave of construction finished closing, the neighborhood didn't hold the level. A handful of new-development buildings along Second Avenue from the last decade lost 20 to 30% off their original sponsor sale values after their initial closings.
Zooming out: the top 10 luxury neighborhoods aren't just where luxury concentrates, they're structurally different from each other. Some, like West Village and Tribeca, have a high concentration of luxury in a small population base. Others, like Upper East Side and Lenox Hill, have high volume but lower concentration of deals within the luxury segment, simply because the area itself is much larger. Lenox Hill alone holds 81,559 residents (2020 Census, NYC Dept. of City Planning), nearly four times Tribeca's population. These top 10 neighborhoods are where luxury actually lives, even though they couldn't be more different from each other.
Current-quarter PPSF read, Q2 2026 vs. Q2 2025. Quarterly Brief, Section 4 →
Where the dollars concentrate only tells part of the story. The rest is how fast that inventory moves.
Months of supply answers one question: at the current sales pace, how long would it take to sell through everything on the market right now?
| Period | Marketwide all price points |
Luxury+ Inventory listings · share |
Prime+ Inventory listings · share |
Trophy+ Inventory listings · share |
Luxury+ Absorption contracts/mo, trailing 12-mo avg |
Implied MoS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 2022 | 2,442 | 427 17.5% | 255 10.4% | 58 2.4% | 114.5 | 3.7 |
| Jun 2023 | 8,621 | 1,423 16.5% | 835 9.7% | 194 2.3% | 74.2 | 19.2 |
| Jun 2024 | 8,462 | 1,462 17.3% | 846 10.0% | 189 2.2% | 76.7 | 19.1 |
| Jun 2025 | 5,863 | 919 15.7% | 567 9.7% | 150 2.6% | 96.1 | 9.6 |
| Jun 2026 | 6,446 | 1,064 16.5% | 646 10.0% | 176 2.7% | 90.2 | 11.8 |
| Quarter | Luxury+ Contracts | Luxury+ Volume | Luxury+ Supply | Luxury+ MoS | Prime+ Contracts | Prime+ Volume | Prime+ Supply | Prime+ MoS | Trophy+ Contracts | Trophy+ Volume | Trophy+ Supply | Trophy+ MoS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q3 2021 | 312 | $3.00B | 176 | N/A | 159 | $2.10B | 116 | N/A | 25 | $0.70B | 19 | N/A |
| Q4 2021 | 441 | $4.11B | 199 | N/A | 225 | $2.84B | 125 | N/A | 31 | $0.78B | 24 | N/A |
| Q1 2022 | 333 | $3.01B | 312 | N/A | 166 | $2.02B | 187 | N/A | 19 | $0.52B | 44 | N/A |
| Q2 2022 | 288 | $2.74B | 427 | 3.7 | 154 | $1.96B | 255 | 4.3 | 21 | $0.58B | 58 | 7.2 |
| Q3 2022 | 154 | $1.32B | 571 | 5.6 | 69 | $0.82B | 335 | 6.5 | 6 | $0.15B | 75 | 11.7 |
| Q4 2022 | 179 | $1.82B | 725 | 9.1 | 98 | $1.33B | 404 | 10.0 | 16 | $0.49B | 89 | 17.2 |
| Q1 2023 | 249 | $2.44B | 1,329 | 18.3 | 124 | $1.69B | 759 | 20.5 | 20 | $0.60B | 176 | 33.5 |
| Q2 2023 | 309 | $2.85B | 1,423 | 19.2 | 145 | $1.88B | 835 | 23.0 | 22 | $0.60B | 194 | 36.4 |
| Q3 2023 | 178 | $1.79B | 1,486 | 19.5 | 86 | $1.24B | 868 | 23.0 | 21 | $0.57B | 207 | 31.4 |
| Q4 2023 | 217 | $2.24B | 1,376 | 17.3 | 117 | $1.63B | 813 | 20.7 | 22 | $0.58B | 207 | 29.2 |
| Q1 2024 | 248 | $2.53B | 1,380 | 17.4 | 124 | $1.80B | 807 | 20.5 | 23 | $0.74B | 184 | 25.1 |
| Q2 2024 | 277 | $3.12B | 1,462 | 19.1 | 131 | $2.25B | 846 | 22.2 | 25 | $1.13B | 189 | 24.9 |
| Q3 2024 | 212 | $2.05B | 1,346 | 16.9 | 99 | $1.39B | 783 | 19.9 | 17 | $0.50B | 165 | 22.8 |
| Q4 2024 | 300 | $3.00B | 1,156 | 13.4 | 158 | $2.16B | 697 | 16.3 | 29 | $0.80B | 163 | 20.8 |
| Q1 2025 | 297 | $3.20B | 1,100 | 12.2 | 147 | $2.32B | 657 | 14.7 | 33 | $1.12B | 155 | 17.9 |
| Q2 2025 | 344 | $3.32B | 919 | 9.6 | 174 | $2.31B | 567 | 11.8 | 29 | $0.76B | 150 | 16.7 |
| Q3 2025 | 197 | $1.82B | 978 | 10.3 | 87 | $1.19B | 607 | 12.9 | 15 | $0.43B | 163 | 18.5 |
| Q4 2025 | 270 | $2.84B | 959 | 10.4 | 140 | $2.09B | 592 | 13.0 | 38 | $1.04B | 158 | 16.5 |
| Q1 2026 | 303 | $3.26B | 895 | 9.6 | 156 | $2.37B | 544 | 11.7 | 30 | $0.97B | 147 | 15.7 |
| Q2 2026 | 312 | $3.18B | 1,064 | 11.8 | 155 | $2.26B | 646 | 14.4 | 24 | $0.80B | 176 | 19.7 |
Trophy's months-of-supply ratio is shown in the table above, but left off the chart. With just 6–38 contracts a quarter, versus 69–441 for Luxury+/Prime+, the ratio swings too wildly quarter to quarter to plot reliably. Q3 2021–Q1 2022 don't have a full trailing-12-month history behind them, so no MoS figure exists for those quarters either (contracts, volume, and supply are still shown).
At 11.8 months of Luxury-plus supply today, it's fair to call this a moderate buyer's market. That reading comes from how much inventory is sitting on the market against how fast it's actually selling.
Now every tier we've covered so far has a new factor to deal with.
As of July 1, New York's pied-à-terre surcharge took effect. It's a new annual tax aimed at the pied-à-terre buyer. This surcharge sits on top of the mansion tax buyers already pay at closing.
This tax targets a specific kind of buyer: someone who owns a home here without living here full time. Plenty of active buyers in this market aren't pied-à-terre buyers, so this isn't a cost that touches the whole luxury market. It's aimed at one segment of it. Until now, nobody has been able to say what share of luxury buyers actually are pied-à-terre buyers. This new tax gives Domi Data a way to measure that for the first time, going forward.
It is a recurring annual cost on non-primary-residence property, distinct from the one-time mansion tax paid at closing. All property types, condos, co-ops, and one-to-three-family homes including townhouses, are taxed on their DOF estimated market value, per NY Tax Law Article 30-C, §§1350–1356. Condos and co-ops fall under one bracket schedule; one-to-three-family homes fall under a different one, shown alongside.
One real Manhattan condo shows why the right figure matters. 83 Thompson Street closed in the $19–20M range. Its DOF property tax bill actually lists two different values: a billable assessed value of $1,290,751 (the basis for its ordinary annual property tax) and an estimated market value of $2,868,335 (the basis for this surcharge). That market value lands in the 4.00% bracket for an annual surcharge of $114,733. We report only the number as it appears on the property's own tax bill. The city's assessed-value and market-value methodologies are both complex and outside the scope of this report.
A second example sharpens the point differently. 15 Central Park West closed in the $21–22M range, a higher price than the first example. Its estimated market value is $1,394,744, also in the 4.00% bracket, for an annual surcharge of $55,790. Despite closing for more, it owes less than half of what 83 Thompson Street owes. The surcharge is calculated off each property's DOF-estimated market value, regardless of what it sold for.
Two condos that closed within a few million dollars of each other end up with surcharges more than double apart: $114,733 versus $55,790. Both numbers come straight from each property's own DOF-estimated market value, independent of what it actually sold for.
Neither buyer nor seller controls the DOF estimated market value before closing. It isn't something a buyer can plan around or negotiate away. And the gap between these two examples isn't a strategy lesson. It's just how the assessment landed.
These two properties are illustrative examples only. They aren't a representative sample of pied-à-terre owners or of how the surcharge lands across the broader luxury market.
How the market reacts to the surcharge in the coming quarters will be a strong indicator of the buyer pool most active at Prime and Trophy: international buyers, domestic second-home buyers, and investors holding luxury residential as an asset class.
Trophy began cooling the same quarter the surcharge was announced. Contracts fell from 30 in Q1 2026 to 24 in Q2, median price from $25.6M to $24.73M, during what is typically the market's strongest quarter. Trophy's quarterly base is small (historically 6–38 contracts), so a move like this should be read directionally rather than as a precise measurement. Luxury's contract count rose over the same stretch (+3.0% QoQ), while Prime held essentially flat (−0.6% QoQ). Only Trophy pulled back this quarter. Whether that's the surcharge taking hold early or Q2 2025's unusually strong base rolling off isn't resolvable with one quarter of data. Domi Data will track this directly against the Q3 2026 baseline. See Part III for the full quarterly count behind this pullback.
Further guidance on how Phase 2's unified market-value model will work is expected before it takes effect in 2028. Domi Data will cover it once it's available. We're not guessing at impact or predicting how buyers will react. We'll report the real numbers every quarter as they come in.
This report finally gives visibility into how the three luxury tiers and their different buyer types behave. Now that the pied-à-terre tax exists, there's a way to measure its real impact for the first time: which price point gets hit hardest, and what share of buyers in each tier are actually pied-à-terre buyers, something previously unknowable. If Luxury and Prime keep performing this well once the new cost is actually being billed, that would suggest a large base of full-time local Manhattan buyers, possibly connected to limited suburban inventory keeping people from leaving the city. Domi Data will watch this pattern as more quarters of billing data come in.
| 83 Thompson St | 15 CPW | |
|---|---|---|
| Closing price range | $19–20M | $21–22M |
| DOF estimated market value | $2,868,335 | $1,394,744 |
| Bracket | 4.00% | 4.00% |
| Annual surcharge | $114,733 | $55,790 |
This is not tax advice. Consult your own accountant or tax advisor for guidance on a specific property. Collection has not begun. First billing is January 1, 2027, and the valuation model itself is scheduled to change in Phase 2 (2028). How collection and enforcement actually unfold remains to be seen.
Live tracking against the Q2 2026 pre-tax baseline: Trophy count and the metrics to watch in Q3. Quarterly Brief, Section 6 →
All Manhattan signed contracts above each tier’s trailing-12-month percentile cutoff · Q2 2021 – Q2 2026 · from Data Powered by Marketproof, starting Q2 2021
| Quarter | Luxury (Top 10%+) · $4.95M+ | Prime (Top 5%+) · $7.23M+ | Trophy (Top 1%+) · $18.23M+ | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contracts | Volume | Median | PPSF | Contracts | Volume | Median | PPSF | Contracts | Volume | Median | PPSF | |