the hamptons

All is not well at the summer playground for America’s rich and famous, as home prices and sales in eastern Long Island tumbled to two-year lows in the third quarter, according to a new Hamptons/North Fork market report from real estate appraisal shop Miller Samuel and brokerage giant Prudential Douglas Elliman.

The quarterly median sales price in the tony vacation enclaves dropped to $729,000, which is the lowest since the fourth quarter of 2006 and 17.3 percent below last year’s median price of $882,000. Third-quarter sales fell from 427 last year to 355 this year, a 16.9 percent plunge, which brought East End market activity to its slowest quarterly pace since Miller Samuel began tracking the area in the second quarter of 2006.  read more »

A toxic mixture of dread, fear, panic, paranoia and self-doubt was brewing in my head on my way out to the Hamptons the last weekend in June.

On the train, I sat on a fold-up chair next to the bathroom and listened to the contents of the bowl swish and swirl around, like the economy and the Bush administration. From time to time, I looked up from my novel (about a sleazy opportunistic journalist in late-19th-century Paris), saw baseball caps, tall boys, tattoos, flip-flops, and shuddered.  read more »

I had been invited to stay at the large, elegant estate of the interior designer Tom Britt.

Maybe people wanted to beat the holiday weekend traffic this year or perhaps they were put off by higher gas prices. Whatever the reasons, the Long Island Railroad lines running between New York City and the Hamptons got a boost in ridership this Memorial Day Weekend compared to 2007.

This year, 44,618 passengers left Penn Station or Jamaica on eastbound trains on Friday, May 23, between 11:30 a.m. and 8:53 p.m., LIRR spokesman Salvatore Arena told us, up 12 percent from the 39,849 riders who took the train on the first day of the holiday weekend in 2007.

On Monday, Memorial Day, 6,775 people headed home, compared to 6,327 last Memorial Day. (“The question is what happened to all these other people?” Mr. Arena said.)

Mr. Arena said ridership on the LIRR between New York City and the Hamptons in April was up 10 percent from the same month in 2007.  read more »

Last summer, when Miles Jaffe released his 170-page lexicon of all things luxe and worthy of mockery in the South Fork, The Hamptons Dictionary, recession was still a retro economic condition associated with the tech bubble and Wall Street was still rolling in money.

Even though Americans are ringing in Memorial Day 2007 in a much chillier climate, Mr. Jaffe’s dictionary of skewering bon mots will surely be as appropriate this summer as back in the halcyon days.

Sure, there might be a few more affluent—defined in The Hamptons Dictionary Platinum Edition as: “1. less than wealthy; 2. Having a net worth of less than $10 million; 3. A disparaging term used by the wealthy to denigrate the merely rich”—folks milling around, but they are not going to broadcast it in the land of conspicuous consumption.  read more »

Coke Anne and Jarvis Wilcox wanted to sell their East Hampton inn, the Maidstone Arms, all along. During the summer season, the famed, 1850’s inn is fully booked, but the winter dry spell sends year-round occupancy rates plunging to around 40 percent.

When no acceptable offers came in, the Wilcoxes decided to begin what was ultimately an “arduous” and unfruitful condo-conversion process. Mrs. Wilcox, a trained architect and mother of three grown children, was planning to convert Maidstone’s 19 rooms and three cottages into 12 separate condos and keep one four-bedroom unit for the family.  read more »

Need to buy in the Hamptons soon? There should be plenty to choose from. The inventory of unsold homes on the market there was up 4.6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the first of 2008 (and a remarkable 27.2 percent from the first quarter of 2007), according to a report from Miller Samuel and Prudential Douglas Elliman.

In the North Fork, inventory was up 10.2 percent quarterly and nearly 20 percent annually.

We'll have more on the Long Island housing market in tomorrow's Observer. Hint: Manhattan. That's all we'll say.