Accountant Mark Goodman tried to explain it to his clients delicately: Setting up an offshore corporation in the Cayman Islands to hold their New York City pied-à-terre wouldn't get them out of the new tax on second homes.

One client wanted to pay a stranger to pretend to live in their second home as a full-time resident. (Goodman talked them out of it). And he is warning others that an impulse to rush a sale could mean taking a financial hit on the property.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani's tax on luxury pieds-à-terre has set off a superstorm among the city's wealthiest homeowners. The new levy will apply to homes worth $5 million or more where the owner isn't a primary resident of the city. The rollout has been messy, with some New Yorkers saying they have been mistakenly targeted.

Actual part-time city dwellers are looking for ways to reduce or get out of the new tax. They are pursuing a number of exemptions, such as proving that an immediate family member lives in the home, or that it is rented out long term.

"People call with creative solutions, only to get angry when I say it doesn't work," said Goodman, who advises high-net-worth individuals for the financial consulting firm Armanino.

The mad dash for tax exemptions has flipped the typical norms of real estate upside down. Hoping to fall below the $5 million tax threshold, owners are now asking appraisers to prove that their property values are lower than they seem.

Rather than hide their property's flaws, they are spotlighting the wear-and-tear on their apartments, their lack of renovation or the fact that there is no doorman in the lobby.

"Normally, it's the opposite," said Michelle Griffith, a luxury real-estate agent. So far, a half-dozen of her clients have requested these kinds of property assessments to counter their tax notices.

Last month, the city's Department of Finance sent out warning notices to about 17,000 homeowners it thinks could be subject to the tax. That alert sent the city's pied-à-terre owners into a scramble. Meetings with estate lawyers, real-estate brokers, tax attorneys, accountants and appraisers suddenly became the hottest tickets in town.

Clients "are calling the firm upset, apoplectic," said William McCracken, a partner at law firm Moritt Hock & Hamroff .

The owners well above the $5-million mark are pursuing other strategies, including a desperate hunt for renters.

As a joke, comedian and entrepreneur Madi Walser started a website to advertise New York City artists willing to stay in empty vacation homes as "charity to the 1%." Then, she received eight inquiries from pied-à-terre owners interested in joining.

"It began as satire. Then the submissions started arriving," Walser wrote in the FAQ section of the website. She is now looking into getting lawyers on board.

Some are considering moving their children who attend New York University or other local colleges out of their dorm rooms and into their pieds-à-terre.

Or they are considering establishing permanent residence in the city because for them, the tax on their second homes outweighs the cost of New York's state and city income taxes. A $12 million, single-family pied-à-terre, for instance, would be subject to a $75,000 tax bill, according to the city comptroller's office.

Others are contemplating the opposite: They want to sell their pied-à-terre properties altogether, though they would then have to weigh the city's transfer tax of as much as 2.9% on luxury real-estate sales. Luxury property sales in the city are already on a tear with new contracts up 29% for the top third of the market, higher than all other segments, according to StreetEasy.

Jennifer Landau-Carter, a retired diplomat who now lives in Paris, had always intended to sell the Greenwich Village townhouse that she inherited after finishing its yearslong, multimillion-dollar renovation. Once she received a pied-à-terre tax notice in the mail, the decision to sell her childhood home got even easier.

"You get this letter and you're like, 'Wait, what? Me?' " she said.

Landau-Carter claims her property isn't a pied-à-terre because it hasn't been habitable while under construction. She said she spent 3 1/2 days combing through the Department of Finance website, filling out forms and consulting AI to contest the tax, which would put her on the hook for more than $64,000. The Greek Revival home is listed for around $20 million.

One married couple that Armanino's Goodman advises is considering establishing separate households to dodge the tax. One spouse would establish their New York City pied-à-terre as a primary residence, while the other, who is their main source of income, would stay put in their Connecticut home.

This setup would allow them to avoid the pied-à-terre tax without their primary breadwinner incurring New York City's notoriously high income tax, Goodman said.

Lawyers say that, at least for this year, the race for exemptions is an exercise in futility for many owners. The first year of the pied-à-terre tax will apply based on how the residence was being used on Jan. 5 of this year, according to the state law. So moving a family member or a renter into the property now would only count toward an exemption next fiscal year, at the earliest.

"There's a lack of understanding of that January 5 date," said Nicholas Montorio, an attorney with a number of Florida-based clients who own New York City homes. "You can't just move someone in now."

Some 7,000 homeowners are in the process of applying for a tax exemption, and the rest have a bit more time to think of creative solutions: Over the weekend, Mamdani gave property owners an extra month to appeal the tax and secure an exemption.