Brooklyn vs. Queens for Home Sellers: Prices, Speed, and What You Keep

If you own property in Brooklyn, in Queens, or in both, the two boroughs do not behave like one market. They differ in typical sale price, in how long a listing sits before going into contract, in how much inventory is competing for buyer attention, and in the mix of co-ops, condos, and houses that make up each borough's housing stock. What they do not differ on is the tax bill a seller owes to New York City and New York State at closing. Those rates are set citywide and statewide, and they apply the same way whether the deed being transferred is in Bushwick or Bayside.

This guide walks through the most recent quarterly market data available for Brooklyn and Queens, compares the two boroughs on price, speed, and inventory, and then works through exactly what the NYC and NYS transfer taxes cost a seller at each borough's median sale price. Every figure below is cited to the report it came from, and every dollar amount in the worked examples is calculated directly from a cited tax rate applied to a cited median price.

One note on scope: this article covers price, timing, and transfer taxes only. It does not compare neighborhoods by who lives there or who a home is "right for" — New York protects a long list of classes beyond what federal fair housing law covers, and that kind of comparison has no place in a market analysis anyway. What follows is sale prices, days on market, inventory counts, and tax math.

01 Median Sale Prices, Borough by Borough

In the second quarter of 2026, Brooklyn's overall median sale price across co-ops, condos, and one-to-three-family houses combined was $1.36 million, up 4.1 percent from the same quarter a year earlier.¹ Queens told a different story: the median sale price across all residential property types was $664,000, up 2 percent year over year but down 3.1 percent from the first quarter of 2026.² On a straight median-to-median basis, Brooklyn's typical sale priced roughly double Queens's in the same quarter.

Brooklyn's price growth was not even across property types. Condos led, with a median sale price of $1.49 million, up 14.8 percent year over year and accounting for 35.3 percent of the quarter's closings; closed condo sales rose 7.2 percent year over year, and luxury closings at $3 million and above jumped 32.1 percent.¹ Co-ops moved the opposite direction: the Brooklyn co-op median fell 3 percent year over year to $728,000.¹ One-to-three-family houses held roughly flat, with a median of $2.1 million, up just 0.2 percent.¹

Queens's Q2 2026 report did not break out a co-op-only or condo-only median sale price the way Brooklyn's did, but it did size up the house market specifically: 1,979 one-to-three-family house sales closed, up 4.1 percent year over year and representing 50.4 percent of all Queens closings for the quarter. The $750,000–$1 million bracket made up 38.9 percent of Queens house sales, up 10 percent year over year, while sales of four-or-more-bedroom houses were up 8.6 percent with a median price up 10.6 percent year over year.¹

Two different data providers covered Queens closed-sales volume for the same quarter and landed on different trend lines: Compass-sourced reporting put Queens closed sales up 4.1 percent year over year, while OneKey MLS-sourced reporting put them down 8.4 percent year over year, with 2,103 closings.¹² That gap is a reminder that "the Queens market" depends on which brokerage's transaction set and methodology a report is built on, and it is worth asking any report you read which MLS or brokerage data stands behind it.

02 Price Per Square Foot: What the Data Actually Covers

Price-per-square-foot is the figure most sellers want for an apples-to-apples comparison, and it is also the figure with the thinnest public reporting at the borough level. The only verified Q2 2026 price-per-square-foot figure available for either borough covers new-development condos in Brooklyn specifically: $1,370 per square foot, drawn from 331 new sponsor units listed during the quarter against a total new-development inventory of 1,585 units, which expanded for a second consecutive quarter.¹

That figure describes new construction, not the resale market that most individual sellers compete in, and no equivalent price-per-square-foot figure was available in the sources reviewed for resale co-ops, resale condos, or houses in either borough, or for any Queens property type. Rather than estimate a resale per-square-foot number, this guide leaves that comparison out. If your listing agent quotes you a borough-wide or neighborhood-level price-per-square-foot figure, ask which data set and which quarter it is pulled from.

03 Days on Market: How Fast Homes Are Selling

Brooklyn's overall median days on market in Q2 2026 was 72 days, which Corcoran's reporting characterized as the fastest second-quarter pace in a decade.¹ That headline number masked a wide spread by price segment: homes under $350,000 took a median 118 days to sell, while homes in the $750,000–$1 million range sold in a median 49 days, down 27 percent year over year. Homes over $2 million saw days on market rise 3 percent year over year, moving against the broader trend.¹

No verified overall days-on-market figure for Queens was available from the sources reviewed for this article; the Queens reporting that was fetched covered price, listings, and inventory but did not state a median days-on-market number. Where a figure could not be confirmed from a source actually reviewed, this guide leaves it out rather than estimate it. For a broader look at how long a New York City sale typically takes from listing to closing, see our guide to how long it takes to sell a house in NYC.

Brooklyn's own contract activity tells a timing story worth noting: signed contracts were down 0.7 percent year over year but up 33.9 percent quarter over quarter, while closed sales were up 5.9 percent year over year.¹ Queens showed a similar contract-versus-closing gap from the same Q2 2026 window, with contract activity up 13.3 percent year over year against closed sales that, depending on the data source cited above, were either up or down for the same period.¹²

04 Inventory, New Listings, and Buyer's vs. Seller's Market

Queens had 7,486 active listings in Q2 2026, up 0.4 percent year over year and up 4 percent from the prior quarter, against 4,968 new listings for the quarter, up 4.2 percent year over year and up 15.2 percent quarter over quarter. That inventory level worked out to 10.7 months of supply, up from 9.9 months a year earlier, and the report that calculated it labeled the current Queens market a buyer's market.² Roughly 700 homes were selling each month against that inventory level.² If you want to see what current Queens inventory looks like listing by listing, our Queens homes for sale guide tracks it.

Brooklyn's Q2 2026 reporting did not publish a comparable months-of-supply figure for the resale market as a whole. The one inventory figure available was specific to new development: 1,585 total new-development units on the market, up for a second straight quarter, with 331 new units added during Q2.¹ That is a sponsor-unit count, not a resale-market supply figure, so it should not be read as evidence of a Brooklyn buyer's or seller's market on its own; no such overall reading was available from the sources reviewed.

Months of supply matters to a seller because it is the standard way brokers translate raw listing counts into negotiating leverage: a market with roughly four to six months of supply is generally considered balanced, and Queens's 10.7 months in Q2 2026 sits well above that range, which is consistent with the report's own "buyer's market" label for the borough that quarter.²

05 Housing Stock: Co-ops, Condos, and Houses in Each Borough

Citywide, only 17.0 percent of New York City's housing units are single-family homes, the smallest share among large U.S. cities, according to a 2024 analysis of housing stock composition.⁸ That figure is citywide rather than broken out by borough, and it predates the Q2 2026 market data cited elsewhere in this guide, but the underlying housing stock composition changes slowly compared to sale prices, so it remains a useful baseline.⁸

The New York City Comptroller's office has published citywide counts by structure type: roughly 450,000 occupied co-op apartments and roughly 318,000 occupied condo apartments citywide, alongside about 378,000 owner-occupied single-family units (28 percent of all owner-occupied housing) and about 216,000 owner-occupied two-family units (20 percent of all owner-occupied housing). That same reporting notes that one- and two-family homes are found almost exclusively in the boroughs outside Manhattan.⁷

For a borough-level read that is specific to Brooklyn and Queens, the closest available proxy is each borough's Q2 2026 sales mix rather than its total housing stock: in Brooklyn, condos made up 35.3 percent of closings that quarter, with co-ops and one-to-three-family houses splitting the remainder; in Queens, one-to-three-family houses made up 50.4 percent of closings.¹ A sales mix is not the same as a stock mix — it reflects what turned over that quarter, not what exists in total — but it is directionally consistent with houses being a larger share of what typically changes hands in Queens than in Brooklyn. If you are deciding between a co-op and a condo listing strategy, our Brooklyn neighborhoods guide has additional borough-specific context.

06 NYC and NYS Transfer Taxes Apply the Same Way in Both Boroughs

Unlike sale price, days on market, and inventory, New York City's and New York State's transfer taxes do not vary by borough. Both taxes are set at the city and state level and apply identically whether the property is in Brooklyn, Queens, or any other borough.

The NYC Real Property Transfer Tax (RPTT) treats a one-to-three-family house, an individual condominium unit, and an individual cooperative apartment identically as "residential" property for rate purposes. The rate is 1 percent of the sale price for sales of $500,000 or less, and 1.425 percent of the sale price for sales above $500,000.³ That threshold and those two rates are set by New York City, not by any individual borough, so a $700,000 condo sale in Queens and a $700,000 co-op sale in Brooklyn owe the identical 1.425 percent RPTT rate.

New York State layers its own tax on top. The base New York State real estate transfer tax is $2 for every $500 of consideration, which works out to 0.4 percent of the sale price, and that base tax is paid by the seller (the grantor) under state law.⁴ On top of that base tax, New York State's "mansion tax" adds an additional tax on residential sales of $1 million or more; that additional tax is paid by the buyer, not the seller, and runs on a progressive scale from 1 percent on sales starting at $1 million up to 3.9 percent on sales of $25 million or more.⁴⁵ New York State's enhanced tax structure for higher-value New York City residential sales took effect July 1, 2019, and has applied statewide-set rates to city transactions since then.⁴

By custom and by statute, the seller is the party who pays both the NYC RPTT and the NYS base transfer tax in a typical resale closing; the buyer separately covers the mansion tax when a sale crosses the $1 million threshold.⁵ Because none of these rates or thresholds are set at the borough level, the tax math below applies exactly the same formula to a Brooklyn seller and a Queens seller — only the sale price changes. For more on what selling costs look like beyond transfer tax specifically, see our guide to the cost of selling a home in NYC.

These are current rates as of this writing. Transfer tax rates and thresholds are set by city and state law and have been revised before, so confirm the current rate directly with NYC Department of Finance or NYS Department of Taxation and Finance before you rely on it at closing.

07 Worked Example: Net Proceeds at Each Borough's Median Price

Using only the cited rates above, here is what the NYC RPTT and NYS base transfer tax add up to at each borough's Q2 2026 median sale price. This is not a full closing-cost worksheet — it isolates the two transfer taxes only, since those are the two costs with citable, borough-independent rates.

The combined NYC-plus-NYS transfer tax rate lands at the identical 1.825 percent of sale price in both boroughs, because both properties sold for more than $500,000 and both taxes apply the same rate structure everywhere in the city.³⁴ What differs is the dollar amount: at Brooklyn's higher median price, the same 1.825 percent rate produces a transfer tax bill more than double the dollar amount owed at Queens's median. A Brooklyn sale at the $1.36 million median also crosses the $1 million mansion tax threshold, but since that tax is buyer-paid, it does not subtract from a seller's proceeds directly, even though it can shape how a buyer negotiates on price; a Queens sale at the $664,000 median falls below that threshold entirely.⁴⁵

08 Seasonality: When Listings Move Fastest

Timing a listing affects both boroughs the same way, since the seasonal patterns come from citywide buyer demand rather than borough-specific behavior. Homes listed in the first week of March have gone into contract a median 16 days earlier than comparable homes listed at other points in the year, and March listings overall carried a 4.1 percent higher probability of selling above asking price compared with other months.⁶ The last week of April performed even better on price, with listings from that week showing nearly a 4.9 percent higher probability of selling above ask.⁶

September, despite still being a relatively active month, saw homes sit on the market a median 14 days longer than comparable listings made at other times of the year.⁶ Winter holiday listings were the slowest stretch, a pattern attributed to buyers traveling and occupied with the holidays rather than house-hunting.⁶ Across the full spring-versus-fall comparison, spring listings sold nearly four weeks faster than properties listed in fall and early winter, and 121.8 percent more listings entered the market in spring than in the fall and early-winter window.⁶

None of this seasonal data was broken out separately for Brooklyn versus Queens in the source reviewed; it is reported at the citywide level. A seller weighing a spring listing against a fall one should still expect the general direction — faster contracts and a higher shot at over-ask offers in March and April, slower going around the winter holidays — to apply in either borough, even without a borough-specific breakdown to cite.

Q&A Frequently Asked Questions