Lower Manhattan Is Home to Two of the Worst Places to Sell a Home in New York
A new analysis from PropertyShark, a real estate web site and search engine that tracks sales and price data, finds that two communities in the square mile at the southern tip of Manhattan are among the worst anywhere in the five boroughs to be selling a home, while one ranks among the best.
The PropertyShark report, “NYC Resale Gains & Losses: Every Borough Made Money in 2025, Except Manhattan,” by Eliza Theiss, divides New York City into 145 neighborhoods, with Lower Manhattan comprised of the Financial District, Battery Park City, and Tribeca. This analysis documents that Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island all earned gains for home sellers in 2025, with the City as a whole seeing a median resale gain of $70,000.
“New York City real estate was profitable for owners who sold in 2025,” the report notes, “unless it was a Manhattan apartment, especially one purchased after 2012. Analyzing 14,877 transactions from 2025 shows a City with two resale markets: Manhattan versus the outer boroughs.”
Manhattan was the only borough with “a negative median resale outcome (-$24,000), weighed down by the underperformance of condos and co-ops,” the report says. And in Manhattan, the worst-performing community was the Financial District, where the median loss was $113,308, based on metrics from 188 sales. This makes FiDi the worst neighborhood not only in Manhattan, but anywhere in New York City to have sold a home in 2025, according to PropertyShark. Ranked 18 places behind FiDi’s worst-in-show performance was Battery Park City, with a median loss of $21,159, based on data from 32 sales.
A local bright spot was Tribeca, where sellers profited by a median $192,323 gain, based on 189 transactions. Even well-heeled Tribeca residents, however, might eye enviously residents of several less-fashionable neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. Sellers in Borough Park, Brooklyn gain a median of $409,217, while those in Fresh Meadows, Queens notched a median upside of $369,969.
“The Manhattan neighborhoods where the typical buyer resold at a loss clustered across the borough’s apartment-dense corridors from the Financial District up through the East and West sides,” the PropertyShark report observes. “Notably, the Manhattan neighborhoods that recorded gains—TriBeCa, West Village, SoHo, Harlem and a handful of others—sit outside of that high-rise spine.”
“Resale results for 2025 sellers paint a picture that has been forming since the mid-2010s, the analysis continues. “For long-time New York City homeowners—those who bought before 2013—equity in 2025 was real and substantial across every borough. But for newer buyers, particularly anyone who bought a Manhattan apartment, the math has not worked out for more than a decade.”
PropertyShark concludes, “the conditions driving those negative resale outcomes in the borough—namely, the luxury condo supply built between 2013 and 2019, the international buyer pool that thinned starting in 2020 and the Fed’s rate environment that ended in 2022—haven’t fully reversed. With additional burdens such as the new pied-a-terre tax, the resale math for New York City owners is looking increasingly uncertain.”