A year ago, if you wanted to buy a resale condo at Skyline Tower in Court Square, you had almost nothing to choose from. By the middle of 2026, that same building had 26 active resale listings, more than any other single address in Long Island City. That is not a typo or a rounding error. It is the clearest single data point in the entire first-half 2026 market report for the neighborhood, and it explains something the market-wide median price cannot: Long Island City is not one market right now. It is two, moving in opposite directions, and they happen to average out to a number that looks calm.
That average is doing a lot of quiet work. If you are comparing listings in Long Island City using price per square foot alone, you are almost certainly comparing two different products as if they were the same thing.
What the flat number is covering up
Long Island City's real estate market cooled in the first half of 2026, driven mainly by shrinking new development supply rather than falling demand. Closings fell 20 percent year over year to 153, yet that total still ran 25 percent above the 15-year average and ranked as the fourth-highest first-half total since 2009. In other words, this is a market that slowed from an unusually strong pace, not one that broke down.
Market-wide price per square foot barely moved. The average rose 3 percent and the median was flat. On paper, that reads as a stable neighborhood holding its value. Underneath that number, two things happened at once. Resale condo listings more than doubled to 155 units, a record 70 percent of all listed supply, as owners who bought during the 2019 to 2021 new-development boom put their units on the market. At the same time, new-development pricing hit records across the board, led by one building closing at a third above the neighborhood median.
Those two forces canceling each other out is the entire story. A flat median is not evidence of a stable market. It is sometimes evidence of a market with two different stories happening in the same zip code.
The building that's now competing with itself
Skyline Tower, the 778-foot glass tower at 3 Court Square, launched sales in May 2019 and finished construction in July 2021. That timing matters more than almost anything else in this report. Buyers who closed at Skyline Tower in 2021 and 2022 are now hitting the point in ownership where relocation, refinancing, or simply cashing out a strong first few years of appreciation starts to make sense. The result: Skyline Tower alone is now the largest source of resale supply in the entire neighborhood, with 26 active listings where a year earlier there were essentially none.
That flood of same-building inventory shows up directly in the sales data. Closings between $500,000 and $750,000 fell 68 percent in the first half of 2026, while sales above $2 million rose 25 percent, led by Skyline Tower resales, including the neighborhood's top sale so far this year at $2.72 million. Resale condos overall had the steepest decline of any category, down 46 percent, though that comparison is against a record high a year earlier rather than a true collapse.
Here is the practical version of what that means. If you own a unit at Skyline Tower and you list it for sale today, your real competition is not Long Island City. It is the floor above you and the floor below you, also for sale, also trying to attract the same buyer pool. That is a different pricing conversation than the one most sellers expect to have.
What new construction is doing instead
While boom-era towers are absorbing their own resale wave, new construction in the neighborhood is behaving like a different asset class entirely. New development inventory actually fell 22 percent in the first half of 2026, to 59 units, with roughly half of that remaining supply concentrated in a single project, Radiant. Tight supply plus steady demand produced record pricing. New development closings held essentially flat at 81 for the half, but that flat number was enough to lift new construction's share of total sales to 53 percent from 42 percent a year earlier.
The building carrying most of that momentum is Vesta LIC, at 11-36 45th Road across from Murray Playground. Developed by Century Development Group and designed by Raymond Chan Architect PC, Vesta launched sales in 2025 with 115 residences ranging from studios to three bedrooms, priced from roughly $620,000 to $1.855 million. By the first half of 2026, Vesta LIC closings reached a median of $1.55 million, about a third above the market-wide median, and the building accounted for more than two-thirds of all new-development sponsor closings in the neighborhood during that stretch.
Part of what buyers are paying for is specific and visible: pre-engineered white oak floors, Alpine Mist quartz counters, integrated Bosch and Bertazzoni appliances, and a location seconds from MoMA PS1 and Gantry Plaza State Park, with Go Nonna, Casa Enrique, and Fifth Hammer Brewing Company within walking distance. Part of it is simpler than that. When new-construction supply shrinks to 59 units and half of what remains sits in one building, buyers who want a brand-new home in Long Island City have very few places to put their money, and price reflects that scarcity.
Reading a listing like a local instead of a portal
None of this means one submarket is a better buy than the other. It means a single price-per-square-foot figure will not tell you which market you are actually looking at.
| Boom-era resale (Skyline Tower and similar vintage) | New construction (Vesta LIC and similar) | |
|---|---|---|
| Supply trend, 1H 2026 | Listings more than doubled; record share of total inventory | Inventory down 22 percent, concentrated in one project |
| Price direction | Softening at the low end, competing within the same building | Record closing prices, up to a third above market median |
| Typical seller | Original 2021-2022 buyer selling four to five years in | Sponsor selling first-time inventory |
| What to check before comparing | How many other units in the same building are also listed right now | How much remaining sponsor inventory exists neighborhood-wide |
There is one more variable worth asking about directly, and it rarely shows up in a listing headline. Buildings from the 2019 to 2021 construction wave typically carry property tax abatements on a different schedule than brand-new construction, and those abatements phase in low before stepping up over time. Two units priced identically per square foot in Long Island City can carry very different long-term carrying costs depending on where each building sits in that schedule. If you are comparing an older tower to new construction, ask the listing agent for the current abatement status and the phase-out timeline on both, not just the asking price.
A few questions worth asking before you compare two LIC listings
Does a lower price per square foot at a 2021-era tower mean it's a worse building? Not necessarily. It often means more owners in that building are selling into the same buyer pool at the same time, which puts pressure on price independent of the unit's actual quality. Ask how many other units are currently listed in the same building before assuming the price reflects condition.
Is new construction automatically the safer bet? Safer is the wrong frame. New-development pricing in Long Island City hit records in the first half of 2026 partly because supply is genuinely tight, with new inventory down 22 percent and concentrated in one project. That scarcity supports price, but it also means less room to negotiate and less comparable inventory to judge value against.
How do I know which submarket a specific listing belongs to? Start with the building's original sales launch date. If it closed its first units in 2019 through 2022, expect resale competition from within the building itself. If it is still selling sponsor units, expect pricing set by the developer rather than by a neighbor trying to exit.
Long Island City rewards buyers and sellers who look past the median and ask which of these two markets a specific listing actually belongs to. That is the kind of read that comes from tracking a neighborhood closely rather than skimming a portal summary, and it is exactly the conversation worth having before you write an offer or set an asking price.
If you are weighing a purchase or a sale in Long Island City and want a read on where a specific building or unit actually sits in this market, the Kirsten Jordan Team is ready to walk through the numbers with you. Inquire Now.
