Real Estate Warning of an NYC Exodus Over a Mayor Mamdani

The chatter started almost immediately. In the hours after Andrew Cuomo conceded to Zohran Mamdani in the Democratic primary, real-estate-industry types rushed to their respective platforms to say what it all meant.

“My number-one job will be moving people from New York to Florida. Again,” Ryan Serhant told the New York Post. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal, Danny Fishman, CEO of Gaia Real Estate, called a Mamdani administration “the death penalty for the city.” (He would also be expanding his business’s footprint in Florida, he added.) Bill Ackman even tried to inspire a mass defection of his fellow billionaires. “Ken Griffin leaving Chicago for Miami on steroids,” the hedge-fund manager wrote on X in a strange call to arms.

But is a democratic socialist running in the general election really causing the city’s wealthiest residents to uproot just like that? This isn’t the first billionaire panic over the fate of the city that we’ve seen in recent memory, after all. In 2013, it was Bill de Blasio. Then it was the pandemic. “The business community freaks out about everything,” one power broker told my colleague Andrew Rice. “Many of them are purely transactional. They’re going to suck up to whoever is in there.”

The more sober-minded brokers we heard from in the aftermath of the primary agreed that the tantrums might be a bit premature. “None of my clients right at this moment are saying ‘Sell it, I’m out of here,’” says Douglas Elliman broker Steve Cohen. The vibe right now seems more therapeutic than active business, he says. Last week, Cohen spoke with at least eight people about the election and real estate, including a businessman–restaurant investor: “He just wanted to discuss, get my POV.”

Cohen wasn’t the only broker working through their clients’ big feelings with them. Miltiadis Kastanis, a Compass broker based in South Florida who works with “ultra-high-net-worth clients,” similarly says that so far, the calls he’s received are mostly exploratory in nature. No one’s pulled the trigger on any kind of transaction. “I don’t personally think a hypothetical election is enough to make someone spend $30 million,” he says. He’s seeing some curiosity about the market: One potential buyer who had previously paused on a purchase in Surfside resurfaced, asking Kastanis whether he could find an identical property. But, he adds, “I don’t think it’s going to be COVID gangbusters crazy.”

And what about the apartments the rest of the city can afford? The heads at the landlord group New York Apartment Association are of course sounding the alarm over Mamdani’s plan for a four-year rent freeze: “A premeditated rent freeze is illegal,” NYAA CEO Kenny Burgos wrote on X. (Even the mayor is feeling some heat off Mamdani’s win, it seems: He called on the Rent Guidelines Board to vote for the “lowest increase possible” on rent-stabilized apartments.) But some in the industry think a win for the Queens assemblyman could be a good thing for housing production more broadly. Per Erik Engquist, writing in the Real Deal: “Although Zohran Mamdani aims to bleed rent-stabilized building owners with a four-year rent freeze, he and the real-estate industry agree on a few things.” Those include: streamlining projects reviews in neighborhoods with low housing production, ending parking mandates, reforming property taxes, and increasing rental-voucher funding. (On the flip side of that, one veteran commercial-real-estate broker tells me that one client is already using Mamdani’s win to try to speed up a project’s development. “Their pitch to their investors is ‘Zohran is gonna shut down private development,’” he says. “‘So if we get this thing financed and in the ground before he’s in office, we’re going to end up with the best building in the market because it’ll be the only new product.’”)

Despite some who may be saying otherwise, the dominant mood in the city seems to be “Let’s wait and see how this goes.” Peter Zaitzeff, a Serhant broker, put it bluntly: “Anybody that’s says they are leaving New York ain’t fucking leaving.” Less than 48 hours after Mamdani’s win, Zaitzeff says he got an offer for $18.5 million on an Upper West Side condo. “New Yorkers are not reactive in the long-term sense,” he says. “They react in the moment out of opinions, but nobody leaves New York.”

Additional reporting by Kim Velsey