Pandemic’s impact on Long Island’s real estate industry

One of the changes seen during the pandemic is a rise in home prices on Long Island. A combination of buyer interest and a decrease in market inventory has led to a median home price increase of more than 10% compared to 2020. Additionally, Long Island has seen an increase in both temporary and permanent address changes from New York City.

Given this market fervor, our next industry analysis is of New York State’s employment data for the real estate subsector, expanding on previous analysis of 2020’s overall employment and the retail industry.

The real estate subsector is a broad group that includes a variety of occupations such as landscaping and groundskeeping workers, real estate sales agents and brokers. You can find out more about the classification here.

If we look at the annual average employment and compare 2020 with 2019, Long Island shows a larger decrease than New York City, New York State, and the US.

And this is what it looks like if we plot out the real estate industry employment change since January 2020.

The chart above uses January 2020 as a baseline and depicts the employment change throughout the year. Long Island’s real estate employment tracks fairly closely with New York State and New York City.

But if we focus only on Long Island – a slightly different picture emerges:

Even though the real estate subsector has not recovered back to pre-pandemic levels, it has recovered far better than Long Island in general. Real estate employment in December was 7% lower than January, compared to an overall 6% decrease in Long Island private employment.

Despite the booming market, realtor numbers not returning to pre-pandemic levels signifies that the industry may have been oversaturated prior to the pandemic or that recovery is still in progress.