“We used to fly to the Hamptons,” a recent Blade passenger told me. “Now we fly to New York.”
Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of the real estate and consulting firm Miller Samuel, who has long kept an eye on the Hamptons market, told me last month that he now calls the four-day window between March 11 and the 15th “from Hanks to banks,” a crucial demarcation period in the real estate market from when Tom Hanks announced he had tested positive for COVID-19 and the Fed announced its second emergency rate cut. Everything pre-Hanks to banks, particularly out east, looked rosy in the first quarter of the year. There was an uptick in activity after a few fairly slow years. Closings were happening. Inventory was moving. And then everything just stopped. “When it comes to sales, anecdata—a hybrid of actual facts and anecdotes, which is all we have at this moment—shows that activity has turned off or paused sharply,” he said.
The rental market, however, lit up. People wanted a safe place for their family to go outside of the city—some place that had more space than most city apartments, a backyard, and proximity to beaches, even though the East Coast is still wearing winter like a sweater well into spring this year. Everyone was Zooming from home anyway, so there was no real need to stay.
“There’s a merger between desire and necessity that we haven’t seen since 9/11,” Cody Vichinsky, cofounder of Bespoke Real Estate, said last month. People who wouldn’t normally start their summer house rental until July wanted to get out there in March. Homeowners who normally rented out their places all summer while their kids went to camp and they went to Europe suddenly realized they, too, needed a place to stay out east, further constricting the inventory. Some landlords who’d already signed leases for the summer needed to rent houses for themselves, since their homes would be occupied. Homes on the beach or on Lily Pond Lane rented for upward of $1 million for the season. And all of these rentals were happening without tenants or brokers even laying eyes on the places, since they couldn’t safely do walk-throughs.
All of this amounted to an unprecedented level of off-season occupancy, during a time when people all over the country were panic shopping and flooding grocery stores to stock up on supplies to last them for an uncertain future sheltered in place.
“The first week or two there was anxiety,” Southampton Village mayor Jesse Warren told me earlier this month. “Our small community was not equipped to handle a July 4–level crowd in the middle of March. You’d go into local markets and there was nothing there. To me it didn’t matter how many people were coming, so long as they were isolating and not hoarding food. Telling people not to come here was not the right approach, though you did see some of that. My job was to make sure that if you owned a home here and rented a home here, you stayed in that home.”
His job, which he ran for 10 months ago, was supposed to be part-time. The 37-year-old already had a full-time job, as an owner of the local high-end clothing store Tenet, which has three locations out east. Since March he’s been working 80-hour weeks in his official capacity, while his stores remain closed.
An early concern was over whether the influx of people would overrun the one local hospital. Warren worked with local organizations to raise tens of thousands of dollars to go toward personal protective equipment for health care workers, and they were able to fund multiple ventilators and hundreds of face masks, gowns, and gloves. They opened drive-through sites where they could slip paper bags filled with free masks under windshield wipers and hand out two-ounce containers they’d stayed up all night filling with hand sanitizer. Last month Warren rode along with local police as they enforced social distancing on public beaches. Benches in town were covered with police tape. Last week they opened up their first drive-through testing clinic, which is free to anyone who needs it. Soon, Warren said, they’ll offer antibody testing in a similar fashion.