How long do home-owning New Yorkers stay in their homes before selling?

Just over eight years.

The statistics — from a new PropertyShark report covering all five boroughs — belie the conventional pandemic wisdom that people have been leaving the city in droves. Last year, New York City homeowners had a median tenure of 8.1 years — one year more than the median “homeowner tenure” of 7.1 years in 2019.

The number-crunching report shows that those living in small homes — one- to four-family dwellings — stayed for nine to 10 years. Co-op owners sold after around seven years.

Two- to four-family homes in The Bronx had the lowest turnover, followed closely by single-family homes in Queens and Brooklyn. These happy dwellers stayed for around 11 years.

Staten Island homeowners had the shortest tenure — around five years.

“Although it seemed like the pandemic made everyone move, upsize or change their current home, there were actually more risk-averse owners out there than trailblazers willing to just up and leave during a period of such stress and uncertainty,” says the report, which covered sales in the past four years.

The slowdown in turnover could be due to “the golden handcuffs” phenomenon, the report says.

“Although there will always be homeowners who need to sell due to major life events forcing them to do so, most owners are quite reluctant to give up on the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages that they secured when interest rates were at rock bottom.”

When it came to turnover, the size of the home didn’t matter much, except when it came to tiny homes in The Bronx. For homes with under 500 square feet, homeowners showed great stability, remaining for almost 22 years.

As for the age of the home, the highest turnover happened in homes less than five years old. The median tenure overall for those was 2.3 years. In Manhattan, that figure was just 1.4 years — possibly because new homes may be starter homes, with people upgrading soon afterward for a growing family or a better job.

New York City’s homeownership rate is among the lowest in the nation. Many occupants of multi-family houses are renters.

When it comes to square footage, “generally, the larger the home, the more time owners spent in it before selling,” the report says. But in Brooklyn and Staten Island, smaller is better. Owners there spent the least amount of time in the largest homes, possibly because of higher maintenance costs.

A similar analysis in California showed that homeowners in Elk Grove and nearby Sacramento stayed for an average of less than 2.5 years. Those in Salinas, the agricultural hub, stayed for more than 9 years.

The number of transactions in the city dipped during the pandemic, with a low of 27,000 in 2020 and a high of 45,000 in 2021. Homeowner tenure is defined as the time between the most recent sale date and the previous sale date. Homes without at least one previous transaction were not included in the data.