NYC Brokers Say Pied-a-Terre Tax Is ‘Class Warfare’ on the Rich
- Foreign buyers seeing assault from conservatives, liberals
- Tax on absentee owners would fund transit and city services
Buildings, seen from Central Park, stand in New York.
Photographer: Jeenah Moon/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
High-end real estate brokers in New York worry that foreign second-home buyers are feeling under assault from all sides and may end up going elsewhere. Already wary of President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, they now see a planned tax on absentee owners as a swipe from the political left.
“The international buyer has basically gone away over the past two years,” said real estate broker Martin Eiden at Compass, who sells about $50 million of residential property a year. “There’s only so much that people will take -- they’ll either go somewhere else or they’ll just get a hotel room.”