The State of Hamptons Building, 2026: What 197,000 Permits Reveal

A data feature from The East End Dig — built entirely from Southampton and East Hampton town permit records and Suffolk County deeds. No estimates, no listing-site guesses. Just what the towns actually approved.

We pulled every building permit on file with the Towns of Southampton and East Hampton — 197,000 records reaching back decades — and normalized them into one dataset. Then we asked the questions the real-estate press usually answers with a broker’s anecdote: What is the East End actually building right now? Where? And who’s finishing?

Here’s what the record shows.

1. The East End is building pools faster than it’s building houses — about four to one

The single clearest trend in the data isn’t a house. It’s a hole in the ground with a liner.

Pool permits across Southampton Town have more than doubled since 2021 — from 293 that year to 636 in 2025, a 117% jump. And 2026 is running hotter still: 538 pool permits were filed through mid-September, a pace that would set a new record by year’s end.

For scale: in 2025 the town issued 636 pool permits against just 156 new-home permits — roughly four pools for every new house. The Hamptons building boom, as measured by what people are actually applying to build, is overwhelmingly an amenity boom — pools, and to a lesser extent solar, which itself doubled over the same period (252 permits in 2021 to 505 in 2025).

The takeaway: the money on the East End is flowing less into new structures and more into upgrading the grounds of homes that already exist.

2. Water Mill is the teardown capital of the East End

If you want to know where the “scrape it and start over” economy is concentrated, follow the demolition permits.

Since the start of 2024, Water Mill leads every hamlet in demolitions — and it leads in new-home permits too. It’s the epicenter of the East End’s defining real-estate move: buy an older house on good land, tear it down, and rebuild bigger.

The rest of the teardown corridor, by demolition volume since 2024:

Water Mill and Bridgehampton show up at the top of both the teardown list and the new-construction list — the signature of a mature scrape-and-rebuild market, where the lot is the asset and the house on it is temporary.

3. The finish-rate reality: most projects break ground, few have crossed the line

Permits tell you what people intend to build. Certificates of Occupancy tell you what actually got finished. We tracked every new-home permit filed since 2023 through its full lifecycle:

• 89% got past the paperwork and were formally issued — shovels in the ground
• ~22% have a Certificate of Occupancy — the project is genuinely done
• ~8% expired without ever reaching a CO — stalled, abandoned, or quietly shelved

That gap between “issued” and “finished” is the part of the market nobody publishes. A large share of East End new-builds are, at any given moment, mid-flight — and roughly one in twelve simply doesn’t make it across the line. When you drive past a half-framed house that’s sat untouched for a season, the permit record is where that story is written down.

4. The money, straight from the deeds

Layer the public sale records on top of the permits and the price picture comes into focus. Across the arms-length deeds we track, the median recorded sale is $975,000 — but the tail is long. The top recorded arms-length sale in our data is $77.5 million (Montauk, 2022); the largest recent one is $56 million (Wainscott, January 2025).

That spread — a sub-$1M median under eight-figure trophies — is the East End in one line: a working South Fork of tradespeople and year-rounders, wrapped around a thin, spectacular luxury market that generates the headlines.

Why this exists

Every number above comes from a primary source: the permit systems of the Towns of Southampton and East Hampton, and the Suffolk County Clerk’s deed records. No automated valuations, no listing-portal estimates, no “sources say.” When the towns approve it, it’s in here.

The East End Dig publishes this every week — who’s building what, where ground is breaking, and which projects just crossed the finish line — pulled straight from the record. If you want the field report before it’s an anecdote at a dinner party, subscribe at theeastenddig.com.

Methodology: 197,253 permit records from the Towns of Southampton and East Hampton, normalized and deduplicated; category and hamlet trends computed on non-draft permits by application date. Sale figures from arms-length Suffolk County deed records, excluding intra-family and nominal transfers. Data current to September 2026.