Long Island home prices climb amid spring listings surge

Long Island home prices approached all-time highs in April as the pace of new listings picked up last month, suggesting buyers might soon have a greater selection to choose from, according to new data released Thursday.

The median sale price in Nassau County last month was $852,000 for single-family homes, increasing 7.8% compared with the same figure in April 2025. The all-time high was $870,000 last August.

In Suffolk County, the median price rose 6.7% year over year to $714,900, according to data from OneKey MLS, the multiple listing service that covers Long Island. Suffolk prices rose to a record $720,000 last September and November.

"It’s pretty shocking seeing that median price continuing to accelerate," said Richard Haggerty, CEO of OneKey MLS.

Closed sales, on the other hand, have gotten off to a slow start to the year on Long Island, falling 11.3% year over year in April. It can take months for sales to close, and pending sales, in which buyers have entered contracts but not yet closed, showed positive growth in April, rising 8.2%.

A shortage of homes on the market — including a drop to the lowest number in more than a decade in February — drove prices higher in both counties, but data from April showed a positive development for buyers. The number of newly listed houses last month rose 15% from the previous year, with Nassau seeing the highest number of new listings since mid-2022.

"I don’t want to get too enthusiastic about it because it could be a snapback recovery because of the harsh winter," Haggerty said. "But I think it could be something more than that. We just need a couple more months of data to see if it’s sustainable."

However, while new listings rose, the number of houses still on the market at the end of April was 5.8% lower than at that same point a year ago.

The rise in new listings still represents a rare positive development for Long Island homebuyers, who have seen prices rise more than 50% since the start of the pandemic. But local real estate experts said strong buyer demand could continue to spur competition even as higher interest rates and gas prices since the start of the Iran war erode buyers’ budgets.

Tom Kain, a mortgage loan officer at TD Bank in Melville, said he has continued to see buyers make aggressive offers on homes this spring. Those buyers have persisted despite a rise in the average rate for a 30-year mortgage from about 6% in late February to 6.36% as of Thursday, according to mortgage giant Freddie Mac.

"Their problem is finding a house and getting an accepted offer," Kain said. "Half a percentage point isn’t going to deter buyers."

Elevated mortgage rates are contributing to higher prices, said Peter Morris, co-owner of Signature Premier Properties, one of the region’s largest brokerages. That’s because homeowners who have locked in low mortgage rates have been reluctant to move and accept a higher rate, he said.

"People aren’t trading in that 4% mortgage to go to a 7% mortgage, and it’s just keeping inventory really tight," he said.

Nationally, the number of homes on the market has risen substantially in the past three years, data from Realtor.com shows.

But Long Island hasn’t experienced that same recovery, Morris said.

"In the rest of the country, real estate is slumping in a lot of areas, and there’s a lot of inventory," he said. "Long Island is just not following the trend of the rest of the country."

One obstacle for longtime homeowners is the potential price of their next home. Jamie Gorman, a broker and owner of JG Homes in Melville, said she is seeing older homeowners face bidding wars as they look to downsize to condo communities.

The median price of a condo in April was $779,000 in Nassau and $550,000 in Suffolk, according to the OneKey MLS report.

"I tell people downsizing is not a term on Long Island anymore because you’re not financially downsizing," said Gorman, who primarily sells homes in Plainview and the surrounding areas. "Financially, it’s either an even swap from their house or they have to put up more to downsize."