A month after Zohran Mamdani’s stunning victory in New York City’s mayoral election, the mass exodus of wealthy residents that landlords and real estate agents—especially down in Florida—had predicted has so far failed to materialize.
Instead, sales of luxury homes in the Big Apple—priced above $4 million—were up by 31 percent in November compared with October to 151 properties, according to the latest data by real estate brokerage firm Olshan Realty.
Another firm, brokerage Douglas Elliman, reported a similar increase, saying that a total of 176 contracts for properties priced at $4 million or more were signed in November, up 25 percent from a month earlier.
“This notion that people are going to flee New York because they don’t like the mayor is pretty ridiculous,” Donna Olshan, president and founder of Olshan Realty, told Newsweek. “If there were people who were thinking about moving to Florida or to another state to escape taxes, and they’re older or retired, maybe this will be a bit of a push,” she added, “but overall most people are just going to stay put,” she added.
“I think a lot of the reaction of people is were very overblown. They got panicked. But New York is New York,” Olshan said.
“If you look at the city in general, there has been no ‘Mamdani effect,’” Corcoran Group broker Noble Black told Fox Business on Monday.
Why It Matters
In the months leading to the New York City mayoral election and the weeks after Mamdani’s victory, enthusiastic Florida realtors and disgruntled New York landlords told everyone, including Newsweek, that the 34-year-old Democrat’s win would lead to wealthy residents leaving the city en masse and relocating their portfolios to the Sunshine State for fear of higher taxes.
This alleged exodus, they said, would have weakened New York City by depriving it of an important tax base, while bringing more riches to Florida. Over a month after Mamdani’s victory, the hype around the so-called Mamdani effect appears little more than wishful thinking, the data shows.
What To Know
Black told Newsweek that he recalled two clients who stopped their search for a property in New York City after Mamdani’s nomination, saying their financial advisers told them to wait.
“I remember thinking then, This is kind of ridiculous,” he said. “And sure enough, even before the mayoral election, both of those buyers restarted their search. They came back into the market,” he added.
“You know, it was just kind of a knee-jerk reaction of people seeing the headlines and being scared, but came back into the market,” Black said.
Olshan said the Manhattan luxury market has been doing “very well” mostly because of “the fact that the stock market has been fairly robust.” The surge in sales, she said, has been fueled by Wall Street’s strong performance this year.
“Wall Street had record compensation in 2024,” Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel, told Newsweek, adding that luxury home sales are on the rise “because compensation is very high.” That, he said, “is consistent with the idea that we’re seeing in our housing data, that the high-end is outperforming the overall market.”
This phenomenon has nothing to do with Mamdani, he said, but had begun long before he became a household name.
“This is all so dumb. It’s based on nothing,” Miller said of the so-called Mamdani effect.
“I also cover about 14 housing markets for Douglas Elliman in Florida, and the on-the-ground feedback from brokers and consumers down there” after the New York City mayoral election “was, Boy, I hope Mamdani wins because the wealthy are gonna flee Manhattan and come to Florida.”
This is “not in the data. There’s no uptick. It’s just all very odd,” he said.
Not only have sales of luxury homes in New York City surged since Mamdani’s victory, but rents for Manhattan apartments have also soared to a record high in November, even as the Democrat ran on a promise to make rent more affordable for residents.
New leases last month were signed at a median of $4,750, up 13 percent from a year earlier and 3.3 percent from October, according to data from appraisal firm Miller Samuel and brokerage Douglas Elliman.
In the rental market too, what is driving up demand and prices is the luxury market, with the top 10 percent of Manhattan rentals seeing the greater price gains of all other tiers, according to Douglas Elliman, up 18 percent to a median of $11,500 in November.
What Happens Next
The Mamdani effect might not have taken place as many realtors were hoping for, but that does not mean that Florida has not seen renewed interest from wealthy New York residents. It might just be that it has happened on a smaller scale than many were hoping for.
The influx of New Yorkers to Florida is not a new phenomenon, but one that has been happening for years as residents move down the East Coast of the country seeking sunny and warm weather, a cheaper cost of living, and a lower tax environment.
“Typically, the brokerage community, the real estate community, try to sell that story. ‘Come down to Miami, we are very pro-business. We have much better tax incentives.’ And that has played out in the long term,” Juan Arias, national director of U.S. Industrial Analytics at the CoStar Group, told Newsweek last month.
“I think that’s the story that is not new with Mamdani. Miami has been an inflow market for all of these states, including California, where people tend to come down here for a different quality of life and also to avoid certain taxes. That’s nothing new,” he added.
“I think the rhetoric around Mamdani was trying to exploit that to a different degree.”
A lot might depend on what policies Mamdani will actually implement when he takes office—but Arias said there is a limit to what he can do. He “doesn’t have the power to increase taxes,” Arias said.
“There’s a few layers above him that actually control that. And in reality, the one sliver that he does control, which is the rent control piece of the equation…that piece of the New York rental market has not been impacted historically. It’s not expected to see tremendous rent growth,” he said.
While Black has long been saying that some of Mamdani’s policies may be “problematic,” he said the mayor-elect is “a long way” from being able to implement them.
“Number one, I think he’s not gonna be able to do it, but I think he’s also gonna probably moderate a lot of what he tries to do,” he added. “I think he needed to make some really bold statements to get noticed during the primary, and that’s what he did.”
And even if Mamdani enacted all he talked about, “it’s not going to happen overnight,” Black said. “People don’t flee the city simply because the taxes are gonna go up two percent,” he added.
Even if more people considered moving out of New York City, Olshan said, the reality is that it takes “a lot” for people to move in general.
“They have jobs, they have kids in school, they have families in the area, they have friends, and you just can’t decide to pick up and move on the prospect that the mayor is going to deteriorate the city,” she said. “So people have been buying and they will continue to buy in New York City. We’ll just have to wait and see how Mamdani governs in New York.”