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How to tell if a NYC listing is priced too high

By Brian · 2026-08-30

The listing is a two-family in Ridgewood, asking $949k for 1,850 square feet, $513 a square foot. The broker's email came with three comps: one two blocks over that closed at $1.02M, one on the next street that sold for $875k, and one from four months ago at $910k. None of the three explains why this ask sits where it does, and none of them was chosen by any method you can check. You have until Friday to write a number on an offer letter.

The short answer: check it against a range, not three examples

A price per square foot means nothing by itself. What matters is where the listing falls against recent sales of homes that resemble it nearby, matched by building type and size, not simply the same ZIP code. A listing priced in the middle of that range, or below it, is asking roughly what the market has been paying for places like it. One priced well above the top of it has room in it, and now you have a number to point to when you say so.

Why three broker comps rarely settle it

A comp a broker sends is a sale somebody judged plausibly similar, not one scored against a stated method for how similar. The Ridgewood packet spans $875k to $1.02M, a 17 percent gap between its lowest and highest example, and nothing in the email says where the ask should fall inside that gap or why. A broker representing the seller has every reason to reach for the highest of the three that are defensible, and the buyer has no way to tell the difference between "this is what the market is doing" and "this is the best example I could find."

Knowing how wide "normal" is before treating one sale in the packet as the market does more work than a fourth comp would.

What normal looks like, by borough

The Department of Finance's own citywide sale records set the range below, for one-, two- and three-family houses over the twenty-four months ending this summer, at $50k and up so a dollar-a-deed family transfer doesn't get counted as a sale. Condos and co-ops aren't in it, for a reason covered below. Manhattan doesn't appear at all: too few one-, two- or three-family houses sell there to clear the bar, the same gap how to spot a flipped NYC house runs into for Manhattan generally. Staten Island's three-family count is thin too, 47 sales in two years, so it's left out as well.

The spread inside one row is the whole point. Brooklyn one-family homes ran from $486 to $864 a square foot between the 25th and 75th percentile, nearly double from bottom to top, and every one of those sales is a documented closed transaction for a one-family house in Brooklyn. A broker could pull a defensible comp from either end and call it representative. The borough gap matters just as much: a Bronx two-family at $368 a foot is priced normally for a Bronx two-family and would be far underpriced for the same building three boroughs over. Crossing a borough line to find a comp, which a packet of three sometimes does, compares two different markets and calls it one.

Apartments need a different kind of comparison

Houses get this treatment because the deed records the size of the thing that sold. Co-ops and condos are a harder case: the same public sale record that gives a house its own price per square foot routinely leaves the sold unit's square footage off the recorded sale entirely, so there is no equivalent city-published band for an apartment the way there is for a house. A broker quoting "price per square foot" on a co-op is almost always working from the listing's own marketing copy, not from anything filed anywhere.

That's exactly where a wider, weighted comparison does the job a raw per-square-foot number can't. Ours starts with every recent sale within about a mile of the address and ranks each one by how closely it resembles the subject, not by how recently it closed. Distance does the early sorting: a nearby sale outranks a farther one within that same radius. Recency counts next, so a sale from the past few months outweighs one closer to a year and a half old, and anything older than that drops out of the comparison entirely. A building with a close unit count and a similar square footage counts for more than one that only shares a ZIP code, and a matching building class and construction era count for more still. What survives that ranking is a sale weighted by how comparable it is, a different and usually sturdier answer than three hand-picked comps.

What to do with the number

Run the same math on the Ridgewood listing. $949k over 1,850 square feet is $513 a foot, and the Queens two-family band above runs $409 to $637 with a median of $519. That listing sits almost exactly on the median, comfortably inside what two-families nearby have sold for. That doesn't prove the price is exactly right. It shows the ask sits inside the ordinary band, which means a counter needs a different argument than "this is overpriced." Had the same math come out at $650 or $700 a foot, well above the top quarter of that range, the number would point somewhere else entirely: roughly where a counter could reasonably start.

Look up any NYC address to see comparable sales ranked by how closely they resemble the subject, rather than a flat list of whatever sold nearby recently. For the rest of what a listing's headline price leaves out, why your NYC property tax bill won't match the listing and which NYC building violations actually cost you money cover the two numbers most likely to change what the same house costs afterward.