Young and wealthy NYC house hunters don’t want stairs

They’re social climbers — but they shun stairs.

Across New York City, real estate brokers cry that a growing fragment of their young, wealthy — not to mention physically fit — clients simply “don’t do stairs.” In fact, so many are now avoiding them to the degree that it may be depressing prices in the high-end townhouse market, they said.

“When they walk into townhouses, they suddenly realize,” said Jeremy V. Stein of Sotheby’s International Realty, who has listed and sold dozens of top townhouses in Manhattan and Brooklyn. “They go, ‘Oh, this is a very vertical experience. I’m going to be going up and down stairs a lot.’ I’m working with somebody right now who lives outside of the country, and he’s been very clear he’d love to be in a townhouse. But he wants something wide because he has this vision of never going upstairs. There’s parts of the house that he’ll just never use.”

Others refuse to compromise, preferring the horizontal splendor of sprawling condos, said broker Mike Fabbri of The Agency. He’s noticed an uptick of buyers demanding single-floor experiences over the old-school cool of a three- to six-story standalone home.

“There’s just such a cachet, something so chic about saying ‘a full floor,’” he said.

By the end of June, the average sale price for a Manhattan townhouse had fallen 18% to $6.3 million, compared to the first half of 2024, according to townhouse specialty brokerage Leslie Garfield’s mid-year report. During that same period, the average price per square foot slipped 6% to $1,245 — despite the overall number of transactions rising. And while a dilating number of leg day dodgers can’t truly be to blame for the dip — brokers said that the trend isn’t helping matters.

Of course, stairs have always had their skeptics — the elderly, for instance, or parents with young accident-prone children. On the other hand, established families have long appreciated the peace a stair-stacked townhouse provides — with adults working or entertaining on one floor, while the children play or sleep on another.

But new money has now flipped the script in the highest segment of the market, where the most established city buyers once played.

“Over the course of the last five years or so, there’s been this wild generation of wealth, new wealth and added wealth,” added Stein. “And you have a lot of very, very rich people coming to New York wanting to buy. And certainly, when you have these younger people who have made a lot of money, whether it’s in finance or tech, they are at the beginning stages of their lives in a way. You tend to see townhouses going to people who are into the mature years of their lives.”

There are plenty of new pancake-flat condos popping up in townhouse-heavy hoods to tempt them. Just look at the West Village, where the twin condo towers of 80 Clarkson St. are now the area’s tallest, sporting the best river views at 420 and 490 feet. It’s also aiming for high prices with townhouse-sized penthouses looking for $75 million and $80 million. They might get it.

In August, a new condo at 140 Jane St. in the West Village went into contract asking $87.5 million, potentially smashing the downtown sale record. Meanwhile, there hasn’t been a West Village townhouse sale over $30 million in well over a year. And while that duplex penthouse on Jane Street does include a sweeping spiral staircase, the vertically challenged need never rise to that occasion.

“It depends on the layout, but what happens a lot in duplexes is that one floor turns into storage or an in-law suite,” said Fabbri. “Rarely does it get used.”

That’s also why condo dwellers tend to expand their homes over a plane rather than burrowing up or down, says Compass broker Vickey Barron.

“I have clients that say, ‘I want square footage, but I want it all on one floor,’” she said. “They don’t want stairs, and they do want the privacy of not having someone to the left and the right of them. So they would rather buy the adjacent apartments rather than the units above or below them.”

And while young rich real estate collectors — those looking in the $30 million-plus range — are turned off by treads and risers, they’re turned on by the conveniences of condo tower living. They want white glove services like doormen, security and concierges already cooked into the property. They don’t want to go upstairs to have dinner and then go up to another floor to watch television.

“There are a lot of very wealthy people that are solo flyers, or maybe they have a family, but their family is in another country or another city,” said Stein. “They’re looking at townhouses, and then they’re also looking at condos. When they see the condos, they’re like, ‘This seems more sensible.’”