I don't believe they have town-funded PR campaigns, either

East egg morphs to west egg

Long Island's North Shore real estate market is booming. The link is to the WSJ, so the full article is behind a cash wall, but here are excerpts: 

Immortalized as West Egg and East Egg in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” these communities east of Queens are resurgent, but with a different population: young families looking for good public schools and alternatives to nosebleed New York City home prices. Instead of seeking sprawling properties with large amounts of acreage, these buyers are fighting over postage stamp-sized properties with easy commutes to Manhattan.

A recent surge in demand has led to intense competition in certain parts of the North Shore market. Long Island (excluding the Hamptons and North Fork) saw 5,754 home sales in the first quarter of 2017—the highest number of first-quarter sales in 14 years, according to a quarterly market report by Douglas Elliman Real Estate.

Brett Coppens, 37, and her husband Brad, 35, last summer moved with their two children from Manhattan to a house in Manhasset’s Plandome village. They can walk or ride their bikes to the train station for a 27-minute ride to Manhattan, where he works in private equity. After outbidding another family, they paid $2.25 million for a four-bedroom home on roughly a third of an acre.

 

Modest houses on tiny pieces of land in Great Neck, Manhasset and Port Washington are being torn down and replaced with larger, more luxurious homes, while multi-acre properties further from the city linger on the market. The current crop of buyers “are not interested in tons of acreage,” said real estate agent Ann Hance of Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty. “They’d rather have a small piece of property and be able to walk to the train station.”

Sadly, here in Greenwich, we seem to be missing this element of the market: no Chinee.

Another reason for the surge in demand on the North Shore is an influx of international buyers and immigrants from Asia and elsewhere. Great Neck and Manhasset in particular have drawn a number of buyers from mainland China, who are looking to invest in U.S. real estate and are attracted to the area’s schools, real estate agents said.

Note that these areas are just a 30 minute commute to the city, compared to the hour-long trip faced by Greenwich residents. Otherwise, the factors feeding the boom: walkable neighborhoods, good schools, seem the same. And like the North Shore, our neighborhoods with small lots and homes priced under, say, $2.5 million, are hot, while large mansions in the $5+ range linger. And the back country? Forget it.