I think it’s important to note that this is asking rent, not what people are paying on average. Landlords do tricks to make rental history appear more expensive than it was, and every online posting should be read as aspirational price, not a real one. Listing inflation helps increase price expectations for the future, and has helped drive the crazy rent inflation NYC has seen post covid (exceeding other expensive metros like SF).
For example- my current apartment had a crazy high lease concession. The paper rent is 30% higher than what I pay. The only inconvenience is that i had to pay a security deposit at the paper rent, not actual rent. It’s like a software business giving 2 months free then multiplying MRR by 12, not taking churn into account. I am moving out after a year.
Realtors pull a similar trick: instead of dropping the price on Zillow (which flags it), they delist and relist at a lower price. Zillow treats it like a new listing, so the price history looks clean. Totally skews market transparency.
I wish lease concessions were also illegal. They've always come with extra gotchas to get them which wouldn't be included in a normal lease, and like you say, encourage this false history.
This is a widespread issue and one of the sources of the major dislocation between theory (supply-and-demand) and practice (rents effectively never drop, on paper). It needs to be outlawed. If you have to lower your rate, you (should) have to actually lower your rate. The rent is (should be) what tenants pay, full stop.
The average 2br rent for the last 2 years was $4,536
The average for the last month is is $5,738
This is a 25%+ increase, let's say around 10% of that can be accounted for via seasonal increases.
The almost certain incoming mayor has pushed for rent stabilization/control/freeze. Let's assume this restricts increases to 10% Y/Y similar to cities like Seattle, this would cause at least a 5% recessionary pressure for housing suppliers.
The big question - is the increase due to greed among the supply (i.e. this pressure is good for the market), due to existing market pressures (i.e. this pressure may cause a wider recession in the housing market), or due to a bubble (i.e. this pressure may pop it, for better or worse)?
Some of it has to do with the FARE bill making broker fees illegal. That should account for a 5% of the increase.
NYC has negligible vacancy rates and airbnbs are already illegal. Sounds like a supply problem. The supply problem gets clearer when you realize how quickly the jersey side has grown. It's because NYC has no supply.
I have no proof for this, but lots of influencer types, nepo babies and people with remote jobs moved to NY during covid and didn't leave. NY Metro population never saw a covid dip, has been steadily growing and RTO mandates are probably causing suburbanites to consider moving back into the city. We are seeing price increases from a repressed real estate market that's finally making bank from the supply crunch.
Compare NYC metro area to SF metro area. NYC saw smaller covid drop, larger subsequent pct growth and a much much larger absolute growth rate. Rent control won't fix anything. They need to start approving market-rate housing at a mad rate. Austin is a great reference.
Just to piggyback some info onto the FARE Act that the NYC City Council passed because I think it's interesting when talking about the second-order effects of some regulations.
For those of you who aren't familiar with this Act, NYC has been an outlier in the US where the tenant would pay a broker fee to rent apartments that were listed by a broker. The odd thing about it has been that it's not the tenant who would historically "hire" the broker, but instead the landlord/owner. And the benefit to the landlord/owner is obvious: they didn't need to expend any resources/energy to market the property for lease and then once a tenant was found the tenant would take care of paying for the broker's efforts through a fee that would range from, say, 8% up to 15% or more of the annual lease rate (e.g., $3000 per month apartment minimum fee would be $3k and sometimes a multiple of that if the broker could get away with it). With the FARE Act this practice where the landlord hired the broker and the tenant pays the fee was banned. You may see where this is going...
For some reason, the NYC City Council thought (and still does think because you can't admit a potential mistake) that the landlord was going to now eat the broker's fee without raising the rent to offset that additional cost. So far? Landlords are not eating the fee and instead are raising the rents. And the worst of it is that the broker fee was always a one-time fee meaning that if the tenant stayed in place they wouldn't be paying the fee again upon lease renewal. Now? The tenant is paying the increased rent to offset the landlord having to pay the fee and that is now the baseline of all future rent increases.
Still early days for the FARE Act, but any reasonable person would've understood that landlords would not eat the broker fee and that this would cause an overnight increase in rents, which... it did (literally overnight once the Act was in effect).
This is all true, but removing the broker fees and replacing it with a rent hike is still better for the market overall, since the broker fees simply artificially dampen liquidity. You only paid them when you moved into a new place, but that meant that if you are stuck with a crappy landlord you might not move out because the marginal cost of moving anywhere else in NYC is much higher.
> For those of you who aren't familiar with this Act, NYC has been an outlier in the US where the tenant would pay a broker fee to rent apartments that were listed by a broker.
It might be unusual in US, but it is a standard thing in Russia: a tenant pays the fee and landlord pays nothing. I always thought it was the same everywhere. However, when selling the property then the seller pays the fee.
As for high prices, isn't it caused by the fact that everybody wants to live there but there is not enough properties for everyone? If the rent in place A is 3 times higher than in place B it means that people want to live in A and whoever lives in B is there only because they cannot afford living in A.
Interesting. Is it the case the landlord hires the broker in that situation? Like the landlord hires the broker, the broker lists it and then the tenant pays the broker? One thing that's still true in NYC is if the tenant hires the broker the tenant still pays the broker, but that's a tiny occurrence relative to the broader practice.
Totally true on high prices. I was only trying to point out that the goal of that FARE Act, or at least a major goal of it, was to keep tenants from having to pay junk broker fees, with the assumption that would lower the overall cost of housing. It might actually be doing the exact opposite, though still too early to tell (only went into effect in June).
> Is it the case the landlord hires the broker in that situation? Like the landlord hires the broker, the broker lists it and then the tenant pays the broker?
Yes. It costs nothing to the landlord in this case. However some landlords prefer to post the ad themselves and do not want to deal with the brokers, as well as some tenants avoid them too.
Thanks for adding context. On the balance, I think it's a good bill.
Like tariffs, all taxes are eventually paid by the customer. But landlords are more capable of applying price pressure on brokers than random renters. It incentivizes landlords to hand out longer leases, which gives renters more security and fewer avenues for eviction. Won't be surprised if a software company (like streeteasy) takes over the ops side of the brokering business and drives the per-sale price waay down. Seems like an obvious startup idea.
Appreciate the optimism and I think what you're saying could happen, and I hope it does, but the flip side is the landlords don't exert that pressure, they bake the fees into the rental rate, and so the new reality is a stepped-up market rate caused by the legislation. If the landlords can just pass the fee on as a rent increase there's not really an incentive for them to offer longer leases so it will all come down to whether the rental rate increase (if there is one long term) sticks. Then I feel like the only thing the FARE Act will have done is raise the baseline rent and therefore the overall cost of housing for tenants (some argue that it's also better to amortize the "fee" over the lease term instead of having to pay it up front, but if the net result is more cost to tenants that seems like a bum deal).
Re the startup idea, agree fully. Zumper sort of tried what you're describing on the lease side in NYC. I interacted with them around the time they launched that effort and thought it was a bit rough around the edges (when is it not when you try something new?). Not sure if they're still doing it or how the FARE Act would've impacted them because I don't quite remember how/if they were using the software/marketplace to drive down the broker fee or just trying to capture the fee as-is (I think the former but not sure).
left this comment on another comment in this thread, so copying it here:
This is all true, but removing the broker fees and replacing it with a rent hike is still better for the market overall, since the broker fees simply artificially dampen liquidity. You only paid them when you moved into a new place, but that meant that if you are stuck with a crappy landlord you might not move out because the marginal cost of moving anywhere else in NYC is much higher.
At least in Manhattan, no one will give you a contract for more than a year - they will want to renegotiate in a year and demand is high enough to not worry about having no tenants. In Europe multi-year contracts are somewhat typical, but never heard of that in NYC. Similarly, very few will do a contract for less than a year. So the one-time broker fee gets amortized over 12 months, but the net effect is a wealth transfer from long-term tenants to landlords (because they continue paying that increase in perpetuity).
Certain units in NYC (about 1mm) are always rent stabilized. They’re rent stabilized because that was the agreement the developer made when getting permissions to build the apartments or more likely because they took advantage of tax abatements and benefits that required a certain percentage of rent stabilized apartments.
Mamdani’s stated policy is to set the y/y increase in rent for already stabilized apartments to 0% as opposed to the 3% average over the past 4 years. And in recent interviews he also has clarified he’s only promising it for the first year to counteract historically high rent increases over the past few years and subsequent years will be addressed like they always are, based on an analysis of the rental market.
Btw, the rent freeze was done at least 3 times in the 2010s with a 0% increase y/y, so this is not even new policy.
That’s all fair context, but rent stabilization as a policy goal has real trade-offs. Freezing rents might offer short-term relief, but long term it disincentivizes new construction.
The issue is their track record. No one believes election campaign promises.
Bloomberg is a centi-billionaire with a track record of loving the free market. His mayoral terms were known for fiscal discipline (vs social welfare spending), hard-on-crime stances (vs. abolish police) and a strong focus on data driven outcomes (vs. intent).
Mamdani is a member of the DSA, which has a track record of being anti-business (Amazon HQ2), pro-regulation (making housing expensive) and pro-union (IMO, NYC unions are a cartel keeping housing & transit more expensive than they need to be).
On paper, they might endorse similar policies, but politicians are judged by their track record and immediate association.
You still have to explain the elite freakout, if he's just Bloomberg Lite. His tone is important. He's getting people used to the idea that they can ask for these things, and that politicians can run on them without obfuscating, for fear of the always-anti-socialist crowd. He's shifting the Overton window.
Trumpian campaign tactics perhaps, campaigning on populist rhetoric while the actual policies leave a lot of populism to be desired. Can’t say it isn’t effective
theres alot of wealthy people in NYC and its only increasing. in neighborhoods like west village or soho, the majority of people are not working corporate jobs. they are paying 7.5-20k a month in rent out of their pockets.
Something seems off with this data. Specifically, DUMBO-Vinegar Hill—Downtown Brooklyn—Boerum Hill has a median rent of $2600, which seems very suspicious.
The neighborhood map seems a little busted. Selecting Fort Greene searches for Elmhurst for some reason. Also, most of Williamsburg is labelled "North Side-South Side" and selecting it searches for Kew Gardens Hills.
Amusingly, selecting Bay Ridge in Brooklyn also seems to select Westerleigh in Staten Island; I know Bay Ridge shares a congressional district with Staten Island, but I assure you we're still a part of Brooklyn.
NYC is deceptive. It's dense, so you don't realize you're crossing a city's worth of people in a 10 minute walk. Median studios in Beverly hills being $6k wouldn't surprise anyone. The Tribeca-Greenwich-West village-Chelsea stretch effectively the same.
Walk a few minutes north from there, and you'll reach hell's kitchen. Much much cheaper.
Is it these days? It's gentrified a lot. Not staying there on my next trip, in part because I sort of fell out of love with the place I was accustomed to staying. But I've stayed around 10th and 42nd a lot.
Not sure why you are dating it there. For one thing, housing prices in NY fell from 2007-2012 so it hasn't been monotonic since the 90s to today. Secondly, housing costs in NY tripled from 1980-1988, which is the same ratio as 2000-2025, but in a third the time.
I know, I’m joking about the tv series having anything to do with it. In reality, it’s because NYC is a city that never sleeps, financial markets call home, immigrants land there, it’s a city of opportunity and the rents reflect that. It’s been going up and up since 1900s.
My tongue in cheek joke was because most of the audience here doesn’t really know NYC history (they should, it’s fascinating) and doesn’t understand that a young quant hedge fund person has no problems paying $10k/mo in rent for a shoebox they’ll never be in. Just to have the NYC address, to be able to work within NYC. Any sane person would look towards Staten Island or Jersey, but even then the rent prices along the transit lines are double what’s available further out.
But I could be wrong and all the history buffs will rebuke me with facts about how commissioners in the 50s did this or that, or that some policy in the 70s created it.
No, crime rose dramatically to a peak in 1990. Housing costs in NYC were stable throughout the 1990s while crime fell by 90%. Pretty much the opposite of what you just suggested.
That is completely true, unfortunately. There are a lot of people in NY. All the demand components — longevity/natural increase, wages, net migration — are increasing and the supply is in stasis, so the price has to rise. Under these conditions you should expect surprisingly non-linear behavior of the market price.
> I've never lived in NYC - are median studio apts in West Village really $6k? Website looks awesome but I'm hoping that the data isn't true
The West Village is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the country. In around 2010, it was the most expensive zip code in the country.
That's due to a combination of: old buildings, very little new construction, extremely gentrified neighborhood, and NYU eating up all of the real estate in the neighborhood.
That said, the map is slightly mislabeled: what's labeled as the West Village is actually Greenwich Village, and the West Village is a subset of that. This map labels places as far east as Astor Place as the West Village, which is not correct.
Saw this too and to reinforce your point about the West Village the conflation of Greenwich with West is actually decreasing the actual severity of the rents in the West Village (since Greenwich Village, on average, is cheaper).
Not sure where creator is getting their neighborhood data from, but if you're reading this a) great job and b) if you can find a more accurate neighborhood source the utility and credibility of what you've created will go up (that's not a knock, but if New Yorkers love one thing it's knowing their city and so as soon as they see data/info that doesn't match the reality on the ground they might bail before giving this a chance).
As a relatively poor student, I actually lived in the West Village for a summer internship in the mid-80s in an NYU law school dorm. Pretty cool place to be.
Housing in Greenwich Village (the broader area including the West Village) has become outrageous in recent decades. A significant reason, but not the only reason, is because the main NYU campus is located in the middle of the small area and doesn't provide nearly enough housing (only ~20%) for the on-campus enrollment.
NYU's on-campus enrollment is also roughly 50% foreign students. I don't have any data about it, but just from experience I've suspected that foreign students are willing and able to pay higher prices for housing.
you should use multimodal AI to filter out apartments that are below minimum living standards(fake 1 beds, heinous layouts, apartments with 0 light etc) which there are a lot of. I think prices would be more accurate that way.
For example- my current apartment had a crazy high lease concession. The paper rent is 30% higher than what I pay. The only inconvenience is that i had to pay a security deposit at the paper rent, not actual rent. It’s like a software business giving 2 months free then multiplying MRR by 12, not taking churn into account. I am moving out after a year.
The average for the last month is is $5,738
This is a 25%+ increase, let's say around 10% of that can be accounted for via seasonal increases.
The almost certain incoming mayor has pushed for rent stabilization/control/freeze. Let's assume this restricts increases to 10% Y/Y similar to cities like Seattle, this would cause at least a 5% recessionary pressure for housing suppliers.
The big question - is the increase due to greed among the supply (i.e. this pressure is good for the market), due to existing market pressures (i.e. this pressure may cause a wider recession in the housing market), or due to a bubble (i.e. this pressure may pop it, for better or worse)?
NYC has negligible vacancy rates and airbnbs are already illegal. Sounds like a supply problem. The supply problem gets clearer when you realize how quickly the jersey side has grown. It's because NYC has no supply.
I have no proof for this, but lots of influencer types, nepo babies and people with remote jobs moved to NY during covid and didn't leave. NY Metro population never saw a covid dip, has been steadily growing and RTO mandates are probably causing suburbanites to consider moving back into the city. We are seeing price increases from a repressed real estate market that's finally making bank from the supply crunch.
Compare NYC metro area to SF metro area. NYC saw smaller covid drop, larger subsequent pct growth and a much much larger absolute growth rate. Rent control won't fix anything. They need to start approving market-rate housing at a mad rate. Austin is a great reference.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/23083/new-...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/23130/san-...
For those of you who aren't familiar with this Act, NYC has been an outlier in the US where the tenant would pay a broker fee to rent apartments that were listed by a broker. The odd thing about it has been that it's not the tenant who would historically "hire" the broker, but instead the landlord/owner. And the benefit to the landlord/owner is obvious: they didn't need to expend any resources/energy to market the property for lease and then once a tenant was found the tenant would take care of paying for the broker's efforts through a fee that would range from, say, 8% up to 15% or more of the annual lease rate (e.g., $3000 per month apartment minimum fee would be $3k and sometimes a multiple of that if the broker could get away with it). With the FARE Act this practice where the landlord hired the broker and the tenant pays the fee was banned. You may see where this is going...
For some reason, the NYC City Council thought (and still does think because you can't admit a potential mistake) that the landlord was going to now eat the broker's fee without raising the rent to offset that additional cost. So far? Landlords are not eating the fee and instead are raising the rents. And the worst of it is that the broker fee was always a one-time fee meaning that if the tenant stayed in place they wouldn't be paying the fee again upon lease renewal. Now? The tenant is paying the increased rent to offset the landlord having to pay the fee and that is now the baseline of all future rent increases.
Still early days for the FARE Act, but any reasonable person would've understood that landlords would not eat the broker fee and that this would cause an overnight increase in rents, which... it did (literally overnight once the Act was in effect).
It might be unusual in US, but it is a standard thing in Russia: a tenant pays the fee and landlord pays nothing. I always thought it was the same everywhere. However, when selling the property then the seller pays the fee.
As for high prices, isn't it caused by the fact that everybody wants to live there but there is not enough properties for everyone? If the rent in place A is 3 times higher than in place B it means that people want to live in A and whoever lives in B is there only because they cannot afford living in A.
Totally true on high prices. I was only trying to point out that the goal of that FARE Act, or at least a major goal of it, was to keep tenants from having to pay junk broker fees, with the assumption that would lower the overall cost of housing. It might actually be doing the exact opposite, though still too early to tell (only went into effect in June).
Yes. It costs nothing to the landlord in this case. However some landlords prefer to post the ad themselves and do not want to deal with the brokers, as well as some tenants avoid them too.
Like tariffs, all taxes are eventually paid by the customer. But landlords are more capable of applying price pressure on brokers than random renters. It incentivizes landlords to hand out longer leases, which gives renters more security and fewer avenues for eviction. Won't be surprised if a software company (like streeteasy) takes over the ops side of the brokering business and drives the per-sale price waay down. Seems like an obvious startup idea.
Re the startup idea, agree fully. Zumper sort of tried what you're describing on the lease side in NYC. I interacted with them around the time they launched that effort and thought it was a bit rough around the edges (when is it not when you try something new?). Not sure if they're still doing it or how the FARE Act would've impacted them because I don't quite remember how/if they were using the software/marketplace to drive down the broker fee or just trying to capture the fee as-is (I think the former but not sure).
This is all true, but removing the broker fees and replacing it with a rent hike is still better for the market overall, since the broker fees simply artificially dampen liquidity. You only paid them when you moved into a new place, but that meant that if you are stuck with a crappy landlord you might not move out because the marginal cost of moving anywhere else in NYC is much higher.
May be a one off anecdote. But, it's a data point.
Mamdani’s stated policy is to set the y/y increase in rent for already stabilized apartments to 0% as opposed to the 3% average over the past 4 years. And in recent interviews he also has clarified he’s only promising it for the first year to counteract historically high rent increases over the past few years and subsequent years will be addressed like they always are, based on an analysis of the rental market.
Btw, the rent freeze was done at least 3 times in the 2010s with a 0% increase y/y, so this is not even new policy.
Bloomberg is a centi-billionaire with a track record of loving the free market. His mayoral terms were known for fiscal discipline (vs social welfare spending), hard-on-crime stances (vs. abolish police) and a strong focus on data driven outcomes (vs. intent).
Mamdani is a member of the DSA, which has a track record of being anti-business (Amazon HQ2), pro-regulation (making housing expensive) and pro-union (IMO, NYC unions are a cartel keeping housing & transit more expensive than they need to be).
On paper, they might endorse similar policies, but politicians are judged by their track record and immediate association.
Summer inflation is much more than that
Also, there's no data for Crown Heights North.
Walk a few minutes north from there, and you'll reach hell's kitchen. Much much cheaper.
(no correlation with the show, just ironic)
My tongue in cheek joke was because most of the audience here doesn’t really know NYC history (they should, it’s fascinating) and doesn’t understand that a young quant hedge fund person has no problems paying $10k/mo in rent for a shoebox they’ll never be in. Just to have the NYC address, to be able to work within NYC. Any sane person would look towards Staten Island or Jersey, but even then the rent prices along the transit lines are double what’s available further out.
But I could be wrong and all the history buffs will rebuke me with facts about how commissioners in the 50s did this or that, or that some policy in the 70s created it.
Doesn't this correlate with the steep drop in crime around that same time period?
The West Village is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the country. In around 2010, it was the most expensive zip code in the country.
That's due to a combination of: old buildings, very little new construction, extremely gentrified neighborhood, and NYU eating up all of the real estate in the neighborhood.
That said, the map is slightly mislabeled: what's labeled as the West Village is actually Greenwich Village, and the West Village is a subset of that. This map labels places as far east as Astor Place as the West Village, which is not correct.
Not sure where creator is getting their neighborhood data from, but if you're reading this a) great job and b) if you can find a more accurate neighborhood source the utility and credibility of what you've created will go up (that's not a knock, but if New Yorkers love one thing it's knowing their city and so as soon as they see data/info that doesn't match the reality on the ground they might bail before giving this a chance).
NYU's on-campus enrollment is also roughly 50% foreign students. I don't have any data about it, but just from experience I've suspected that foreign students are willing and able to pay higher prices for housing.
Just build more. Sure.