THE six-bedroom Hamptons home belonging to Joanne Corzine, the former wife of Gov. Jon Corzine of New Jersey, was listed for $900,000. That was not the sale price, of course, but rather the asking rent for the summer.  Ashley Gilbertson for The New York Times  Jay Litvack held off making a deal for his house in East Hampton and saved $475,000.  Late last month, a tenant whose identity is cloaked behind a confidentiality pact agreed to rent Ms. Corzine’s place through September. “In terms of available rentals it stood out,” said the listing agent, Beate Moore of Sotheby’s. Built in 1990, the traditional-style Sagaponack house occupies 6.6 acres and has landscaped lawns, a tennis court, a gym and 500 feet of ocean frontage.  Even in a recession, it seems, the Hamptons still manage to attract the kind of people who do not flinch at spending nearly $6,600 a night on rent. And multimillion-dollar homes continue to sell, especially in the more desirable areas south of Route 27.  At the same time, however, a cloud of gloom has pervaded those thick Hamptons hedgerows. During the first quarter, the number of leases signed and the dollar volume of sales shrank to half of the levels from the similar period last year, said Rick Hoffman, the regional senior vice president for the Corcoran Group.  Prospective tenants who might have felt pressure to snag a house by Presidents’ Day are starting their search later, figuring that rents will drop as the summer approaches, agents say. Clients who used to lease a house from Memorial Day to Labor Day are now settling for a month, or  in a phenomenon rarely seen before in the Hamptons  even a week or two.  “In the 20 years I’ve been doing this, this is the weakest rental market I’ve seen,” said Jan Robinson, the owner of Hampton Homes, a local brokerage. Ms. Robinson said her rental business was down by 70 percent from last year.  Last year, a Manhattan couple, Joshua Levine, 33, and Leigh Manheim, 31  he works in finance, she is in fashion  had only three rental houses to choose from in their price range of around $30,000. But on a recent Saturday, they toured 11 houses, winnowed from a list of about 30, all with four bedrooms and a pool.  The next day Mr. Levine and Ms. Manheim, who will be sharing the rental with two other couples, heard about another house that rented for $40,000 last year and could now be had for $10,000 less. They took it. “We got double the house we got last year,” Mr. Levine said. The house has a living room with cathedral ceilings and access to a community tennis court.  Owners who are willing to be flexible have a better chance of finding renters, agents say. Ms. Robinson, for example, found a tenant to rent an East Hampton house for two weeks, half the term the owner was looking for.  One house in Westhampton Beach that was listed for $50,000 a month for July and August was rented when the owner accepted an offer of $75,000 for both months, said Judy Carroll, an agent at the Marketplace, a family-owned brokerage based in Westhampton Beach.  Owners are making other concessions  like extending the lease through the end of September, say, or agreeing to absorb landscaping costs. One house rented after the owner covered the furniture with white slipcovers, said Susan Breitenbach, an associate broker at Corcoran. Many owners “are spoiled,” she said. “They are not used to having to do stuff like that.”  Since sales have slowed, some of the high-end homes that were built on speculation and would have sold briskly in a stronger market are being furnished and marketed as rentals, Ms. Breitenbach said.  The slowdown in the rental market is mirrored in the sales market, where prices have dropped to 2006 levels. Preliminary first-quarter data from Corcoran shows that median prices have declined by about 20 percent over the same period last year, Mr. Hoffman said. In 2008, the median price for homes on the South Fork (including the Hamptons and Shelter Island) was $891,000, according to Corcoran.  In the first two months of this year, 60 sales were recorded in the Hamptons, compared with 107 in the first two months of last year and 330 in the similar period in 2007, said Susan Vincennie, general manager of Long Island Profiles, a company in Brightwaters, N.Y., that publishes recorded real estate information. The median price of homes sold in January and February of this year was $675,000, compared with $840,000 in January and February 2008, and $999,000 in the 2007 period, she said.  Inventory has increased 6 percent since the first quarter of 2008, according to Mr. Hoffman.
There still aren’t many bargains on the South Fork of Long Island, but since so little is selling, prospective summer renters have a lot more from which to choose.