Ask most buyers what happens when a neighborhood's resale prices climb past new-development prices and they'll tell you the market got tight. Everyone wants what already exists, builders can't compete, simple supply and demand. That story is clean, and in Long Island City this year it is also wrong, or at least incomplete.
In the first half of 2026, average price per square foot on Long Island City resale condominiums rose 22 percent year over year to a record $987, while new-development pricing in the same stretch actually fell 4 percent, to $1,091. Read quickly, that looks like resale finally caught up. Read against the transaction data underneath it, it looks like something narrower: one very large building supplying most of the resale inventory, and a small number of very expensive sales pulling the average with it.
The Number That Doesn't Match the Volume
Here is the detail that should stop a buyer before they lean on that headline stat. Resale condo closings in Long Island City fell 46 percent year over year in the first half of 2026, the steepest drop of any segment in the market. Fewer resale deals closed than in any recent comparable period, yet the ones that did close set a price record. That combination, fewer transactions and a higher average price, is not what a broad-based seller's market looks like. It is what a market looks like when a handful of large, expensive units skew the math.
The mix shift shows up elsewhere too. The median size of a unit sold climbed from 657 square feet a year earlier to 865 square feet in the first half of 2026. Closings priced between $500,000 and $750,000, the segment a lot of first-time LIC buyers compete in, dropped 68 percent. Sales above $2 million rose 25 percent. Put those together and the "record resale price" is really a story about which units transacted, not about every resale unit in the neighborhood getting more valuable at once.
One Tower Is Doing Most of the Talking
The building responsible for a large share of that shift has a name: Skyline Tower, the 67-story condominium at 3 Court Square, the tallest condominium tower in Queens. A year ago it had essentially no active resale listings. By the first half of 2026 it had 26, making it the single largest source of resale supply in the neighborhood. This year's top resale sale in Long Island City so far, at $2.72 million, also came out of Skyline.
That is a lot of weight sitting on one address. When a tower with hundreds of large, view-driven units goes from zero resale inventory to two dozen listings in a year, and those listings include the priciest resale of the year, it moves the neighborhood-wide average by itself. Resale condo listings across Long Island City more than doubled year over year, climbing to 155 active units and now accounting for a record 70 percent of all listed supply in the neighborhood, much of it tied to owners who bought during that 2019 to 2021 development wave choosing to sell now, at scale, and getting paid for it.
On the other side of the ledger, new-development active inventory actually shrank in the same period, falling 22 percent to 59 units, with roughly half of what's left concentrated in a single project, Radiant. A shrinking, single-project-heavy pool of new-development listings can pull an average price down just as easily as a genuinely softening market can, depending on which specific units are left standing. A new-development discount driven by a thin, concentrated remaining inventory is a different fact than a new-development discount driven by falling demand across the segment, and buyers comparing a resale unit to a new one need to know which one they're looking at.
Here is what the first half of 2026 looked like across the two segments, side by side:
| Metric (1H 2026 vs. 1H 2025) | Resale condos | New development |
|---|---|---|
| Average price per square foot | $987, up 22% | $1,091, down 4% |
| Active listing count | 155 units, up from a year ago, ~70% of listed supply | 59 units, down 22%, ~50% at Radiant |
| Closings | Down 46% (steepest of any segment) | Roughly flat, share of closings rose to 53% from 42% |
The Tax Clock No One Puts in the Listing Photo
There's a mechanical reason a wave of resale listings would arrive several years after closings began at towers from that 2019 to 2021 development boom, the exact vintage now generating this year's resale wave, and it has nothing to do with taste or timing luck. Many of those buildings were completed under 421-a tax abatements, the property tax exemption program the city used for decades to spur new residential construction before it lapsed for future projects in 2022. Buildings that secured the exemption before the cutoff keep their benefit for its full original term, but that benefit was never permanent, and it was never flat.
Look at current Long Island City listings and the exemption shows up building after building, with different clocks running on each one. A one-bedroom at The Dutch Condominium is currently marketed with a 421-a running through 2033. A studio at The Hero cites the same 2033 expiration. A one-bedroom at Star Tower carries an exemption that runs through 2035. Three different buildings, three specific years, none of them identical. Whether Skyline Tower's own units carry a comparable exemption, and if so how many years are left on it, is exactly the kind of detail worth confirming address by address before comparing its resale listings to a brand-new unit at Radiant.
One common 15-year 421-a phase-out pattern works like this:
- Years 1 through roughly 11: full exemption on the tax increase tied to the new construction
- Year 12: exemption drops to about 80 percent
- Year 13: drops again, to about 60 percent
- Year 14: about 40 percent
- Year 15: about 20 percent
- Year 16 and beyond: full taxes apply
For an owner who bought early in a building's abatement window, that step-up can turn a modest monthly tax bill into a bill several times larger, permanently, with no recourse beyond a formal assessment challenge. That is exactly the kind of number a buyer needs before comparing a "discounted" new unit to a "record-priced" resale one, because the resale unit's seller may be exiting ahead of a tax increase the listing photos will never mention. You can check a specific address's exemption status and remaining term directly through the city's property tax lookup tool, and the city publishes the underlying benefit schedules by program type on the Department of Finance's 421-a page.
What This Means If You're Actually Comparing Two Units
If you're weighing a resale unit at an established LIC tower against a new-construction unit at a project like Radiant, the price-per-square-foot gap on its own tells you less than it looks like it does. Three questions do more work than the headline number:
First, how many years are left on the resale unit's abatement, and what does the building's offering plan say about the step-up schedule. That document discloses the exact timeline, and it's worth reading before the sticker price becomes the whole decision. Our guide to decoding Long Island City condo offering plans walks through what to look for.
Second, is the new-construction unit's lower average price a function of where it sits in a building's sales cycle, not a discount you're personally getting. A project selling out its middle floors during a slower stretch prices differently than a project's penthouse inventory, and neighborhood averages don't separate the two.
Third, run the full carrying-cost trajectory for both units, not just this year's number. A resale unit two years from a 20-percent tax step-up and a new unit with eleven years of full exemption left are not competing on the same terms even if their current monthly bills look similar today. Our breakdown on how to read Long Island City condo financials covers how to model that forward.
If you already own in a building like Skyline and you're weighing whether now is the moment to sell, the same math runs in reverse, and it's worth understanding before you list. Our post on resale strategy for Long Island City condo owners goes through the seller side of that decision.
A Few Questions Worth Settling Before You Make an Offer
Does every 421-a building in Long Island City face a tax cliff at the same time? No. Schedules run 10, 15, 20 or 25 years depending on the version of the program and when construction began, and the clock starts from each building's own completion date, not a citywide calendar. Two towers finished a year apart can be years apart on their abatement timelines.
How do I find out how much of a specific unit's abatement is left? The city's own property tax lookup tool will show the exemption and its projected end date for any address, and the building's offering plan discloses the full schedule, including the step-up years, in writing.
Does a lower price per square foot at a new building always mean it's the better deal? Not automatically. A newer building often has more years of full exemption ahead of it, which can outweigh a modest price gap once you model both units' tax bills five and ten years out rather than comparing today's number alone.
Long Island City's first-half 2026 numbers tell a real story, but it's a narrower one than the headline suggests: fewer resale deals, with the single largest slice of that resale supply sitting in one very large tower, against a shrinking new-development pool concentrated in one project of its own. Comparing the two segments on price per square foot alone tells you which buildings are transacting. It doesn't tell you which one is the better carrying-cost decision for the next decade.
If you're weighing a specific unit in Long Island City, whether it's a resale listing with a few years left on its abatement or a new-construction unit still early in its exemption window, that's exactly the kind of math Mark O'Brien Real Estate works through with clients before an offer goes in, not after. Book an appointment and we'll run the real numbers on the specific address you're considering.
