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April 12, 2012 12:01AM
By Leigh Kamping-Carder

Manhattan rents in the first quarter of 2012 broke records set before the economic crash, according to market reports released today by residential brokerages Prudential Douglas Elliman and Citi Habitats, and experts attribute the increase to tight credit markets that have prevented tenants from entering the sales market.

The average monthly Manhattan rent reached $3,650 in the first quarter, a 6 percent increase over the $3,445 average during the same period last year, according to the Elliman report, which uses industry-wide data compiled by Jonathan Miller, the president of appraisal firm Miller Samuel. The number of rental transactions also increased, jumping 14.3 percent to 7,642 units from 6,665.

“Anecdotally, everything was competitive — rents were going up, there was greater competition for apartments,” said Yuval Greenblatt, an executive vice president who is on Elliman’s management team. “We saw the numbers [in the first quarter reports] clearly supported those anecdotes.”

Citi Habitats, which relies on the firm’s own undisclosed number of transactions, pegged the average rent at $3,418 in March, the highest monthly figure since the firm began tracking these data in January 2002. Citi Habitats’ previous record, set in May 2007, was $3,394.

Average rents were also up slightly over the last quarter, both reports show.

“These numbers don’t surprise me,” said Gary Malin, president of Citi Habitats. “We’ve seen the writing on the wall for some time.”

What’s new is that rents continue to rise even while the overall economy is more or less stalled. That is the result of a restrictive lending environment that has forced some would-be homeowners unable to meet strict borrowing requirements to remain tenants.

“What’s driving the rental market is more about tightness of credit than an improving economy,” Miller said, “unlike the last boom in the mid-decade where we had this frothy, credit-fueled economy and people were just priced out and became renters.”

Some tenants are surveying the rising rents in Manhattan and deciding to move to the outer boroughs, Malin said.

But rents in Brooklyn are also on the rise. The median rent for a Brooklyn one-bedroom rose to $2,308 in March, up 8 percent from the previous year, according to a monthly Brooklyn report released today by residential brokerage MNS.

Meanwhile, a first-quarter report released yesterday by online rental management firm RentJuice reveals that Brooklyn rents had skyrocketed compared to the previous year.

Another feature of the current rental market is what Miller described as “musical chairs,” where more Manhattan tenants are opting to move instead of renewing their leases, particularly when landlords present them with rent increases.

Listing inventory was up 33.4 percent in first-quarter 2012, to 5,167 units from 3,874 units, the Elliman report says. This was largely the result of greater mobility among Manhattan renters — and not additional units being offered for rent, experts said.

Although rental units sat on the market for an average of 41 days, about half a week more than in the first quarter of 2011, the listing discount dropped by about half compared to the previous year, the Elliman report shows. Landlords discounted rents by 2.2 percent in the first quarter of 2012, compared to 4.3 percent a year earlier.

The vacancy rate was up a sliver, resting at 1.22 percent versus 1.08 percent in the first quarter of 2011, the Citi Habitats report says.

While average rents were up across all unit sizes, the greatest increases were found in one-bedrooms, where rents rose 6.5 percent over the same period last year, Citi Habitats says. Studio apartments saw the smallest increase, at 3.6 percent

October 18, 2011 12:11PM

New York City’s renters are racing for an increasingly limited supply of multi-bedroom units, according to an inaugural quarterly rental market report by RentJuice, with only 36 percent of listed New York City apartments containing two bedrooms or more.

The average price to lease a New York City home is $3,267 per month, but renters are paying $7,782 on average for a unit in west Soho, Manhattan’s most expensive area, RentJuice’s data shows. Other pricey neighborhoods include Tribeca, Central Park South and Battery Park City, which are have monthly rents averaging at $7,782, $5,151 and $4,159 respectively, according to the report.

If a renter is seeking multiple bedrooms, Brooklyn may be the obvious choice. In Carroll Gardens, 70 percent of rentals listed in the third quarter of 2011 had two bedrooms or more, compared to just 36 percent in New York City overall. Nearly 65 percent of listings in Williamsburg also had two-bedrooms or more.

April 26, 2011 11:41AM

If you’re looking to rent on the Upper East Side or Soho and don’t need a doorman, now might be the time to make a move. While rents overall fell .6 percent in April, rents for non-doorman units on the Upper East Side fell 5.67 percent from a month ago, and non-doorman one-bedroom unit rents in Soho dropped 17 percent in the last six months, according to the Manhattan rental market report released today by the Real Estate Group of New York.

Overall, the average rent in non-doorman Manhattan units fell 2.84 percent this month, while doorman unit rents rose .8 percent, and inventory across the board rose 3.84 percent. But the report notes that rents are up 6 percent from April 2010, and with the spring renting season underway, TREGNY said it expects the market to pick up steam in the next few months — particularly in Harlem, where rents are becoming more competitive than those in the rest of Manhattan.

These findings are similar to the first-quarter rental numbers previously reported by The Real Deal, which showed negligible gains compared to the prior quarter, but a 20.3 percent increase over the first quarter of 2010. Currently, two-bedroom doorman units in Soho pace the market with an average rent of $8,938, while non-doorman studios in Harlem garner the cheapest rents at $1,513. The data TREGNY compiles is from a cross-section of 10,000 available listings in Manhattan, each with rents below $10,000, from mid-March to mid-April.

Ain’t No Lie, It’s Cheaper to Buy

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Since the housing bubble burst, it seems like everyone and their mother can’t stop talking about what a great time it is right now to buy a home, but how good is itreally? After years of seeing home prices drop like flies and rental markets tightening up better than pair of Spanx, it’s safe to say that homeownership is very affordable almost everywhere. In fact, it is now cheaper to buy than to rent in 98 of the 100 most populous metros – including (shocker!) pricey places to live like New York, Los Angeles and Boston.

Says who you ask? Our Trulia’s Winter 2012 Rent vs Buy Index – that’s who! To give you a little bit of background, this Index is what we use to figure out whether buying a home or renting in a given metro is easier on the pocketbook. To do this, we look at asking prices for rentals and homes for-sale on Trulia.com while also factoring other costs like taxes, insurance and maintenance, etc.

Click here to view the full-size interactive graphic. 

Just see for yourself. After ranking all the metros (marked as dots in the chart below) in order of where buying is most expensive relative to renting, notice that the two metros at the top of the list —Honolulu and San Francisco — are no where close to being orange, let alone being in the red (read: renting is cheaper relative to buying). At best, they are a nice mustard yellow, which means that the asking price between renting and buying isn’t all that different. Instead, what really matters if you’re only doing a basic cost comparison is (1) your tax bracket and whether you can benefit from the mortgage interest deduction and (2) how long you actually plan to live in the house.

Start Spreading The News, I’m Leaving NYC For The Suburbs Today

Truth be told, it won’t surprise anyone to say that you need to be making some serious bank in order to be a Manhattan homeowner. Housing crisis or no housing crisis, it’s still going to be a really expensive place to live compared to pretty much anywhere else in the U.S. of A. However, if you can let go of Manhattan city living (like Miranda in “Sex and the City” did), then you might be pleasantly surprised to know that buying a home is definitely doable. You just got to look even further than Brooklyn and Staten Island (priced-out Manhattanites have bid up home values in many neighborhoods…boo! hiss!). How far? Think Queens, the Bronxand other nearby suburban counties

Forest Hills is located in the borough of Queens, on Long Island, and can be reached from Manhattan by subway on the E, F, G or R lines. When you emerge from the subway in downtown Forest Hills on the corner of 71st and Continental Avenues, you are only steps away from the historic Forest Hills Gardens Square. The two blocks on Continental Avenue before you reach the square are a bustling shopping district, lined with all the usual stores and businesses. You get a taste of the Arts & Crafts architecture to come, though, when you pass the facade of the Forest Hills Cinema on Continental Avenue. It must have been a beautiful theater at one time. The cross street before the square, Austin Street, is the principal shopping district of downtown Forest Hills and actually attracts shoppers from other boroughs, mainly because the stores are open on Sundays. You enter the Main Square by passing under an overpass of the Long Island Railroad to arrive at the next cross street, Burns Street. Standing at the corner and looking over your left shoulder, you’ll see the steps leading up to the railroad station. It was from these steps that President Roosevelt made his opening ceremony speech. The steps and railroad station are sorely in need of repair, and the Forest Hills Gardens Corporation has already begun a massive restoration. Phase One has been completed with the repairs of the underpass. Phase Two will address the steps, station and platform and should begin shortly. The square is surrounded on all sides by buildings reminiscent of the Bavarian walled cities of Europe. This is in keeping with the style of the English Garden Cities. In fact, the architecture is almost identical to that in the Hampstead Garden Suburbs of North London, England,another planned community that has survived as it was designed in 1906 by Edwin Lutyens.

Directly in front of us, the center of the square is divided by a green island with benches and trees and small gatehouses at each end of the island. In warm weather, it is a popular place to read, chat or simply watch the world go by. The square itself is distinctive from the converging streets in that it is paved in red cobblestone, like the original. The buildings around the square house businesses for the most part, including a small sidewalk cafe to the right, very much in the European tradition. Directly across the square is the original Forest Hills Inn, now the Forest Hills Inn apartments. The huge tower atop the Inn is a focal point of the square. Where streets converge into the square, elevated covered walkways span the streets, joining the buildings to maintain the sense of a walled city surrounding a central square.

If we cross the square and continue down Continental to Dartmouth Street, we find that the Forest Hills Apartments also continue down the right hand side of Dartmouth. The entrances to the apartments, as well as the ornamentation and exterior treatments, closely follow the Arts & Crafts style of architecture. The houses, too, could be picked up and transplanted into a typical English city and they’d blend in perfectly. If we were to turn right down Dartmouth Street, the next cross street would be Tennis Place. Here, to the right, we find the venerable old West Side Tennis Club. The clay courts are still maintained perfectly and the original English Tudor clubhouse is immaculate. The stadium, though, has seen better days and is in a serious state of disrepair. But not enough, apparently, to keep the Club from booking the stadium as an outdoor venue for performers like Diana Ross. Nearby #2 Tennis Place is where you’ll find the offices of the Forest Hills Gardens Corporation.

Continuing down Continental Avenue, we are skirting the edge of the Gardens proper. On both sides of the tree-lined street are beautiful old houses in various styles, many of them in the Old English and Arts & Crafts styles envisioned by the original architects of the Gardens. We’ll turn left at a cross street to enter the heart of the Gardens. At the center of the Gardens is the Park at Greenway Terrace. At the beginning of Greenway Terrace, nearest the main square, the spire of the First Church of Christ Scientist catches the eye. It’s a beautiful old building that looks as though it were sculpted from a single block of sandstone. The park is beautifully laid out. The circular benches at one end of the park grab your attention immediately. You can sit for awhile and, if you brought along a bag of snacks, share it with one of the many squirrels in the park. Unlike their country cousins, city squirrels have no fear of the two-legged variety of animals visiting their park and, with patience, can be coaxed to eat from your hand. The park is also home to the War Memorial, a sculpture by Adolph A. Weinman commemorating the men who died in “the Great War” (WWI). The Greenway Apartments dominate the site as the tallest building in the Gardens. Even the huge archways of stone blocks that mark the entrances to the Apartments are impressive. They were originally intended as low rent apartments for the working class but are now, ironically, much-sought-after apartments for the very well-to-do. The building itself is now owned by the Helmsleys (the infamous Leona Helmsley of the Helmsley Palace Hotel), and it is rumored that in order to get an apartment you must be on a three- year waiting list. When someone dies, you move up another notch. Just behind the Greenway Apartments is the Garden’s school, P.S. 101, that can boast of being the only public school in New York City without bars on its ground floor windows. The rowhouses that border each side of the park are designed in the style of Old English stone cottages, with stone fences, brightly painted wooden gates, and even the odd stone gazebo. Nearby, on North Greenway Avenue, you’ll find the lovely old Church in the Gardens, a non-denominational house of worship.

Enjoy looking at property in Forest Hills and Kew Gardens. Tom will guide you through the steps whether its a rental or purchase.