Resi Agents Rally Against NYC’s Pied-a-Terre Tax Rollout

Some of New York City’s top residential agents turned their clients’ anxieties into advocacy on Tuesday, gathering ahead of the City Council’s Tuesday hearing on the city’s pied-á-terre tax.

On the steps of City Hall, Compass’ Jason Haber used bombast and puns to summarize their objections to the city’s abrupt rollout of the policy, which included publishing an online list of over 900,000 homeowner addresses that could be subject to the tax.

“We are in the dox days of August,” Haber said at the pre-hearing press conference. “We are here to say we are guilty until proven resident, and we are here to say that this is wrong.”

Haber, who is also the president of the New York Residential Agent Continuum and co-founder of the American Real Estate Association, stood in front of a crowd of about a dozen luxury brokers, including Compass’ Leonard Steinberg and Douglas Elliman’s Heather Domi, holding green signs that read “Guilty Until Proven Resident” and “Dox You Very Much.”

Residential agents in the city have emerged as a vocal opposition bloc to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-á-terre tax since New York City residents began seeing their addresses appear on a list published to the Department of Finance website and receiving notices informing them that they may be subject to the tax without an appeal last month.

Given the tax has already been passed, agents have been left to speak about the rollout, which Haber called “botched” in his testimony about the tax’s implementation.

Their opposition to the rollout seems to stem from the frustrations felt by their clients, who can rely on high-end agents as on-call real estate consultants beyond the day-to-day buying and selling.

“I’m not here to litigate this act itself, that debate is not with this body,” Haber testified inside City Hall, hours after his press conference. “I’m here to talk about the execution and when that execution fails its citizens.”

Arguing over how the tax is implemented may be little more than a stalling tactic on a broader scale, but agents are often the ones left helping clients navigate the appeals process for the tax, or even trying to sell or rent a home to help a client avoid the tax.

“Its added to our workload to help our clients because we offer full service,” Domi said in an interview, adding that news around the tax has “impacted at least half of the deals” she’s worked on in the last year. Domi pointed to a client renovating a currently empty home that received a notice of the potential tax, and another client that recently left the city for Arizona and is staring at a tax bill of over $60,000 if they don’t sell their home this year.

When asked about how the tax has affected his job the most, Steinberg, in a text, said simply: “lots and lots of time spent explaining.”

One concern raised by both Steinberg and Domi, as well as others in attendance, stemmed from the city’s use of a $1 million market value threshold for condos and co-ops that could be hit with the tax.

Passed as part of the state budget that went into effect on July 1, the tax targets secondary homes in the city that are assessed by the city above a certain threshold: $5 million for single-family homes and $1 million for condos and co-ops, which the city had previously calculated as being close to a $5 million million value on the open market.

But during her testimony, Domi pointed to a condo at 344 Bowery Street that sold for $3 million in April and has a $1.6 million market value, making it tax-eligible despite its actual transaction value being well under the city’s stated goal threshold of $5 million.

“The system is so incredibly flawed in the way that it is valuing these properties,” she said.

The rollout of the tax has been marred by controversy since the beginning. At the end of July, the city published a list of over 900,000 homeowners on the Department of Finance’s website as part of the process of identifying properties eligible for the tax. The city also sent initial notices to roughly 17,000 homeowners informing them that their properties may be subject to the tax.

The city drew fast criticism for the rollout, culminating in a lawsuit filed on Aug. 7 by three homeowners who claimed to have either seen their names appear on the broad list published on the city’s website or received an initial notice despite living in the city as full-time residents.

The lawsuit seeks to halt the city’s rollout, rather than attack the tax itself, which is unlikely to face a substantial legal challenge.

On Tuesday, the Real Estate Board of New York called on the city to pause its tax implementation until “it can demonstrate it is ready to administer the tax fairly, accurately, and transparently.”

In terms of long-term demands, agents and other critics have been left with a dead end. That is, except for an apology, which Steinberg requested during his testimony.

“What I’m asking today is for the Mayor and for the City Council to group together and come up with an apology to all New Yorkers,” he said.