HOME prices in the Hamptons, the summer resort of Wall Street bankers and Hollywood celebrities, have plunged a record 19 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier as stocks tumbled along with financial jobs.

The median price for a home on the eastern tip of New York's Long Island fell to US$830,000 from US$1.03 million, the biggest drop in at least five years, according to a report yesterday by New York-based appraiser Miller Samuel Inc and broker Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate that was obtained by Bloomberg News.

Prices in the summer retreat of director Steven Spielberg and billionaire investor Thomas H. Lee reached a record high with a US$1.1 million median in the second quarter of 2007, before the subprime crisis went global.