rental market

Rents these days! For all this chatter about a recession, it’s still awfully expensive to live in Manhattan.

Taking a quick gander at the average rents for Manhattan neighborhoods in Citi Habitats’ October rental report, two things become abundantly clear: Most people can’t afford to live in Soho/Tribeca and all spendthrift renters need to move up to Harlem.

There, you can live still live in a studio and pay less than $1,200 a month. The Lower East Side is the cheapest place to rent a studio south of 110th Street, but even that will set you back just over $1,600 a month.

With studio rents at $2,400 a month and one-bedroom apartments at $3,653, Soho/Tribeca tops out as the island’s most expensive enclave, although the West Village and Chelsea aren’t far behind.

The worm is finally turning in Manhattan’s winner-take-all apartment universe. According to the Manhattan-specific October rental market report released today by Citi Habitats (PDF here), vacancies are up and rents are down, all of which is playing to the advantage of renters who have been at the mercy of not terribly merciful brokers and landlords since, oh, forever.

Vacancies in Manhattan apartments increased from 1.46 in September to 1.71 percent in October, a 12-month high. While Battery Park led all neighborhoods with a vacancy rate of 2.02 percent, vacancies were up in each of the other 10 neighborhoods tracked by Citi Habitats, including always popular neighborhoods like the East Village and the Upper West Side.

There is also some downward pressure on rents, perhaps due to the uptick in idle apartments. Average rents for studios, one-bedrooms, two-bedrooms and three-bedrooms all fell modestly from September to October. Some neighborhoods are falling faster than others, however, and some of the most severe drops are in surprising locales.  read more »

The Real Estate Group New York's out with its October Manhattan rental market report, and C.O.O. Daniel Baum says what we're all thinking:

"It’s apparent that the rental market is struggling this month,” Mr. Baum said in a statement. “Doorman studios are down 7.23 percent, and doorman one-bedrooms have declined 3.21 percent in year-over-year comparisons. To us, this seems to be a clear indicator of downward forces beyond simple seasonality trends.”

It's not just the winter months--it's the financial crisis.

More apartment stats here (PDF).

This is the second in a three-part series today covering the Manhattan housing market since autumn 2007. The first was on the condo sales tumble.

Apartment rents in Manhattan's two biggest neighborhoods by area, the Upper East and West Sides, either dropped or stayed relatively flat from September 2007 to September 2008, harbingering a further cooling off in the rental market (just like the ice cubes tossed this summer on the for-sale market), according to the latest report from The Real Estate Group New York (PDF here).

The apartment market and the local economy have a nearly real-time relationship, and the flat rents the last 12 months in these two neighborhoods could become the norm through the winter as the financial crisis worsens. Certainly, Manhattan's beyond the recent era of sharp rent jumps.  read more »

"Brokers are bottom feeders. Best way to find an apt. is to go to the building where you want to live and ask the super or find who the management agent is and deal with them directly."

"You pay for professional services; that's how the world runs. If you walk into a real estate office asking for someone's time and knowledge, don't complain when you get charged. No management offices charge a broker's fee, that's why it's a broker fee because the broker charges you it for their time and knowledge of the market!!" ["My Rental Broker: 'I'm Just Concerned With Getting You a Place You Love'"]

From the New York Post this morning:

To attract new residents, the complex is adding 200,000 plants, 10,000 trees and has put in a fancy new gym. Pets, which were once a huge no-no, are now everywhere. And the complex is offering more free movie nights, cocktail mixers, sports leagues and outdoor events.  read more »

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It’s that time of year when thousands of recent college graduates descend upon Manhattan for their obligatory, pre-suburban stint in the city.

Manhattan’s rental market is traditionally the tightest from May to August and early September—apartment-hunting season for newly christened young professionals.

After their hopes of living below 23rd Street in quasi-bohemian squalor are dashed by a broker, the Manhattan newbie has just a few neighborhoods to choose from.

The first place they look is Manhattan’s unofficial frat district Murray Hill—er, "Murray Hell," that "mini-Manhattan theme park" full of "coddled post-collegians, armed with marketing jobs and U. Penn diplomas," which The Observer's Lizzy Ratner examined in a 2005 profile.

A decade ago, when the Real Estate Group COO Daniel Baum first noticed the trend, the neighborhood’s main draw was affordability.

Yet, even steadily rising rents have not diminished prepsters' love for the East Side nabe.  read more »

The New York City rental apartment market is tied closely to the local economy, more so than the sales market. That market might see foreigners buying a lot of condos even as Americans lose their jobs. But the rental market--it tends to rise and to fall with the city's economy. Generally, job losses and uncertainty in New York translates into more vacancies and lower rents.

So the news that JPMorgan Chase and the Federal Reserve are acquiring Bear Stearns, the world's fifth-largest investment bank and one of New York's most prominent employers, could ultimately be good news for the city's renters. Grimly and pragmatically speaking, any layoffs could reduce the number of people who need to be in the city by thousands. That could free up apartments; and that greater vacancy could drive landlords to drop rents.  read more »

I wrote in today's Observer about the drops in doorman-building rents. The stats for that story came from a new February market report by The Real Estate Group New York.

Some of the other stats in the report show a marked increase in Lower East Side rents. For instance, the average monthly rent in a two-bedroom in a non-doorman building increased 3.3 percent from March of last year to $3,273.  read more »

The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in a non-doorman building on the Upper West Side was $2,478 in January, according to a report (PDF) from brokerage The Real Estate Group New York. The average for a one-bedroom in a non-doorman building on the Upper East Side was $2,439. In doorman buildings, one-bedrooms averaged $3,549 on the Upper West Side and $3,534 on the Upper East Side.

At least one of the 1,700-plus apartments at Gateway Plaza, the gated six-tower rental complex on South End Avenue, hasn't been getting all its letters, checks, DVDs, and magazines lately. "[T]he substitute mail carrier handling the mail in the building has decided to send all mail addressed to tenants whose name he does not recognize back to the sender," says an anonymous tenant's rabble-rousing letter.

Oddly, a copy was sent to our newsroom today.  read more »

Chelsea's rental market remains one of the most expensive in Manhattan, according to the Real Estate Group's 2007 year-end report, but some apartment sizes weathered an erratic year better than others.

Daniel Baum, the group's COO, told The Observer what most suprised him in the 2007 data was Chelsea's resiliency.  read more »

Manhattan's apartment market remained relatively strong in 2007, with rent jumps averaging between 2.2 percent and 6.5 percent in most apartment sizes, according to a new report from The Real Estate Group New York.  read more »