Though Queens is regarded as one of the cheaper boroughs when it comes to purchasing a home, a new study find that prices in the “World’s Borough” are on the rise.
According to Point2 Homes, an online real estate marketplace, Queens comes in 12th place out of 15 for the most expensive housing markets in North America. The median home price in the borough is $369,000, the highest since 2008, the study said.
The study is based on quarterly reports and monthly market studies in December 2015 and took into account cities in the United States and Canada with a population of 500,000 or more. Not surprisingly, Manhattan ranks second on the list while Brooklyn ranks fourth.
Queens beat out Denver, Colorado, Portland, Oregon and Dallas, Texas.
An analysis by PropertyShark, an online property research tool, shows that the increasingly pricey Brooklyn is pushing more people toward Queens.
The number of permits filed for residential and mixed-use buildings in Queens has soared in the last three years, according to PropertyShark. In 2015, 8, 906,937 square feet of property was in the process of being developed. In 2014, that number was 6,709,328 square feet compared to 3,903,625 square feet in 2013.
The median price per square feet also soared to $359, jumping 9.8 percent since 2013.
“If these numbers are anything to go by, it seems that Queens is indeed flying a bit too close to Manhattan and Brooklyn’s bright sun, which in turn would explain the presence of the borough alongside some of the most expensive housing markets in North America,” Liviu Oltean of PropertyShark said.
