BY MICHAEL STAHL
StreetEasy recently gathered and analyzed public mortgage data from the New York City Department of Finance in an effort to locate neighborhood differences in new home down payments. The site unveiled their findings in the form of an interactive map, outlining the wide variety of down payment amounts in sections across the city, separating stats on condo and townhouse sales in 2015.
Queens buyers provide far less money up front when closing on a home when compared to those in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The typical down payment for a Queens home is $124,406, or 26.7 percent of the sales price, while Manhattanites lay out $447,398 — 30.6 percent of the sales price — up front. Brooklyn buyers relieve themselves of $176,250 — 25 percent of the sales price in a down payment; however, Bronx homeowners pony up just 20 percent.*
“Since home values are … much lower in the Bronx compared to the rest of the city,” John Wiley, a site data scientist wrote in the map’s corresponding blog post, “the typical down payment there translates to roughly $25,200. This is far more approachable for many first-time buyers who may have a limited budget.”
Wiley also noted that Bronx transactions fall in line with trends throughout the United States, where the typical down payment hovers around 20 percent. Thus, most New Yorkers save up sizable amounts of money in preparation for purchasing a home compared to the rest of country.
GRAPH COURTESY OF STREETEASY. The boroughs broken down by median down payment.
This fact proved especially true throughout Queens’ eastern enclaves last year. According to Alan Lightfeldt, another data scientist at StreetEasy, “There are a lot of big savers … in neighborhoods like East Flushing, Flushing, Queensboro Hill and Corona [where] the median down payment size exceeded 35 percent. With more saved up and low sale prices relative to the rest of the city, the decision to buy a home in numerous parts of Queens would makes financial sense relatively quickly for many buyers.”
Typical down payments on condos in Western Queens hotspots Astoria and Long Island City were 22.4 percent and 25 percent of the sales prices, respectively, which worked out to $112,100 and $217,500. People purchasing a house in Astoria provided 22.1 percent ($181,995) of the sales price up front, while that same figure exceeded 30 percent ($201,936) in LIC.
Like buyers in the Bronx, down payments in Maspeth, Ridgewood, Glendale, and Jamaica were around the national average of 20 percent in both condo and house sales, all among the Queens neighborhoods with the lowest such number.
For more information and to find out what buyers put down where you live, visit streeteasy.com/blog/estimating-a-down-payment-in-nyc/
*StreetEasy did not provide Staten Island figures, citing insufficient available data.
