Recorded Sales Methodology

The sales tables on our Hamptons pages come from one public source: New York State's record of real property transfers. Every deed filed with a county clerk in the state must be accompanied by a transfer report, Form RP-5217, and the county forwards those reports to the state each month. The tables show what that record says, filtered and labeled so it is not read as more than it is.

This page explains what the record contains, what it leaves out, and the rules we apply before a sale, a range or a median appears on a page. Every table is labeled "recorded sales through July 2026." None of them is "all sales."

What the RP-5217 record contains

The transfer report is filled in by the buyer and seller (or their attorneys) and filed with the deed. The fields we use:

• Location and tax-map number of each parcel conveyed.
• Number of parcels in the deed, and whether only part of a parcel was conveyed.
• Full sale price: the total consideration paid, including any mortgage assumed. Seller concessions are excluded.
• Personal property included in the price, such as furniture or a boat.
• Sale contract date and date of sale, the date title passed, usually the closing.
• Conditions of sale: whether the parties are related, a lender or government agency is involved, the deed is not a standard warranty or bargain-and-sale deed, less than the full interest was conveyed, or other unusual factors applied.
• Condominium: a check box marking the sale of an individual condominium unit.
• Assessment information from the last final roll: roll year, total assessed value and property class code.

What it does not contain

• Co-op sales. A co-op transfer conveys shares, not real property, and the state does not require a transfer report for it. Co-op sales are absent.
• Asking prices. The record shows what was paid, not what was asked.
• Days on market. The record has no listing history.
• Party names on our pages. The record identifies buyer and seller. Our source extract carries no party names, and none appear on any page.
• Anything that did not come with a recorded deed. The report travels with the deed; no deed, no report.

Arm's-length sales only

An arm's-length sale is one negotiated on the open market between unrelated parties, with no undue pressure on either side. The state's Office of Real Property Tax Services treats a sale as not arm's length if:

• the price, less personal property, is $10 or less;
• more than a year passed between contract and closing; or
• any condition of sale is marked, such as a sale between relatives, a foreclosure, a partial interest or an estate transfer.

Our tables use only sales the state record treats as arm's length. A family transfer or a $10 deed into a trust is a real recorded event, but it is not a market price, and it stays out.

The date shown is the sale date

The date in each row is the conveyance date: the day title passed, as reported on the RP-5217. It is not the contract date, which can be weeks or months earlier, and it is not the date the deed was recorded. The column is labeled "Sale date."

Multi-parcel sales are shown as packages

One deed can convey several tax parcels: a house and an adjoining lot, or an estate assembled from several lots. The RP-5217 reports one price for the whole deed.

That price is never shown as the price of one address. A multi-parcel sale appears as a package, marked as such, with the number of parcels it covered. It is left out of medians for single properties.

Houses, land and partial interests are separated

A house sale, a vacant-land sale and the sale of a fractional interest are different transactions. Our tables keep them apart:

• Houses: improved residential parcels.
• Land: parcels recorded under a vacant-land class at the time of sale. The class comes from the roll and can lag what is on the ground, so high-priced land-class sales are reviewed one by one before they appear.
• Partial interests: sales of less than the full ownership. These are listed only where relevant and never used in a median.
• Condominiums: shown on community pages and kept out of house figures.

How many sales before a number

Small samples mislead. The rule depends on how many broadly comparable sales a place has, meaning the same property type in the same jurisdiction:

Every table also states the number of distinct properties or units behind the sales. Ten sales of the same three houses are not ten data points about a street.

On mixed estate lanes, where a modest cottage and an oceanfront compound share a road, we may withhold a median even at 15 or 20 sales. A median of things that are not alike describes nothing.

Medians use a recent window

A median, where shown, uses sales from 2023 through 2025: three complete calendar years. A partial year is too thin and skews toward whatever happened to close first.

Where a decade-wide figure is useful, it is labeled "historical transaction median" with its start and end dates, so it is never read as a current price.

We do not compare a median from one small pool with a median from another and call the difference appreciation. If the houses that sold in one period were larger or closer to the water than the ones that sold in another, the medians move without any house changing value.

Filters by place

• Town first. Street names repeat across the East End. Further Lane exists in East Hampton and in Riverhead; Beach Lane exists in Wainscott and in Westhampton Beach. Every lane and hamlet figure is filtered by town and, where it matters, village.
• Sales with no hamlet in the record stay out of hamlet, lane and community figures.

Assessment-roll fields

Some rows show year built, bedrooms, bathrooms or living area. These come from the town's assessment roll, not from the sale, and are labeled roll data. The roll is filled in unevenly; many South Fork parcels have no entry for some fields. The roll does not record architectural style, so style on our pages is editorial, not data.

No price per square foot is published. Roll living area is missing for many parcels, and we have not yet adopted a method that makes a per-foot figure reliable.

A separate series from the Hamptons Index

The Hamptons Index is compiled from published market reports and public data, and reports area-level prices on its own definitions and periods. The recorded-sales tables are built directly from the state's transfer record for a specific place, lane or community.

The two are different series. A hamlet median on a recorded-sales table can differ from the Index figure for an overlapping area because the geography, period, property mix and source differ. Each figure is labeled with its source so the two are never read as a contradiction.

What the tables cannot tell you

A recorded sale is evidence, not a valuation. It does not say what condition the house was in, whether it had water frontage, what the buyer planned to do with it, or what the same house would bring today. A careful price opinion starts from the recorded sales and then adjusts for the property in front of you.

Want a pricing opinion on a specific property?

Request a private pricing review from The Roebling Research Desk, built on the recorded sales for the exact town, street or community, adjusted for land, water, condition and approvals, and set against the sales that genuinely compete.