Forget window shopping the photos of million-dollar manses in the real estate shops on Southampton's Main Street. If you really want to know how the housing market in the Hamptons is faring as summer beckons, Steven Gaines suggests an unusual yardstick.
He said the best barometer of how people in the Hamptons are doing was the price of the lobster salad at the local gourmet shop in nearby Sagaponack. Right now, it is US$100 per half kilogram.
"When you're spending US$100 a pound for lobster salad, what's US$15 million for a home?" said Gaines, a local author and aficionado of all things Hamptons.
With Wall Street booming and stock markets hitting record highs nearly every day, the real estate trade in the Hamptons could not be better. And money appears to be no object.
Houses are routinely selling for US$10 million to US$15 million and people do not think twice about shelling out US$200,000 for a three-month summer rental.
Last week, it was reported that financier Ron Baron paid more than US$100 million for a 16-hectare East Hampton property -- no home, just land -- located next to his sprawling estate.
"The houses in the US$10 million to US$20 million range are selling very well, which, of course, reflects the boom on Wall Street," said Gaines, who hosts a radio program on Hamptons culture every Sunday from the lobby of the American Hotel in Sag Harbor.
Going back nearly a century, the Hamptons -- an unincorporated confederation of villages and hamlets stretching 64km along eastern Long Island's south shore -- has traditionally welcomed the rich and famous from near and far. Pristine sandy beaches and bucolic country roads have been a haven for the blue bloods and the wannabes alike, all willing to plunk down parts of their fortunes on Hamptons palaces, big and small.
Judi Desiderio, president of Town & Country Real Estate, estimated that 75 percent of her customer base came from Manhattan power brokers.
"As long as the economy in the city and on Wall Street is doing well, our high-end market is also doing well," she said.
While the national real estate market has been described as "soft," the same does not hold true for Manhattan or the Hamptons, said Stuart Epstein, the owner of Devlin-McNiff Real Estate.
"If there's an imaginary bubble over Manhattan, I'd say that bubble extends 125 miles [201km] out to the end of Long Island," he said.
By all measures, times have been very good on Wall Street. The banking sector has been on a tear, driven by a spate of mergers and acquisitions in recent months. The Dow Jones is getting closer and closer to 14,000. And Wall Street paid out about US$24 billion in year-end bonuses last year.
"These folks," Epstein said, "there's a lot of them, they're making great money and there are not all that many ways they can spend it."
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