Rents are soaring throughout NYC as supply is dwindling.

President of the Rent Stabilization Association: Joseph Strasburg  The Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) will be making a highly debated decision next week in regards to a percentile increase of rent stabilized apartments. Although this vote takes place every year, this year’s decision has been exceptionally publicized due to a potential rent freeze. Bill de Blasio, the first mayor to ever run on the platform of a rent freeze, may come through on his promise—considering that over half the board has been given a seat via his appointment. Although the board favors implementation of the first rent freeze in NYC history, the Rent Stabilization Association (RSA) has other ideas.

Mayor de Blasio has so far stayed in consistency with his plan to create more affordable housing here in NYC. One method of making NYC a more affordable city would be pursuing a renters’ freeze of regulated rents. The Rent Guidelines Board, which is comprised of nine people, had five seats on this board that were recently up for re-appointment or new appointments in March. De Blasio had finally filled these five of the nine seats. The other four seats left for re/new-appointment will be filled in December 2014.

Source: CoreLogic It seems New Yorkers are on the right track. Back in 2010, the risk of default for renters applying for apartments was at a mundane 98 for 2 bedroom apartments, and close to 99 for 1 bedroom apartments. Being as numbers below 100 increases the risk of default for applicants, New Yorkers were in a position - financially - of having property managers more readily deny their applications. According to CoreLogic, in a short two year period this risk of default has dramatically changed.

After an exciting August – both in terms of the weather and the real estate market – expectations ran high for September. Not only did August have remarkable increases in rental prices all over Manhattan, but it also had a hurricane and an earthquake. That’s a tough act to follow, and it didn’t help that September had lots of rain and humidity. Nonetheless, September was a good month for Manhattan real estate overall, although not nearly as torrid as August. The gains made in September fell very much in line with luxury rental market trends of the past 3 years. Recent months showed divergent trends between studios and everything else, and that held true for September: while rental prices rose for 1- and 2-bedrooms, studio prices went down. Right now, Manhattan studios are undoubtedly the best bargains in the city. The luxury market still looks good though; overall rents increased by 0.8% in September even with this decline.

We talk about the renter's market here at the Luxury Rentals Manhattan blog the way that older men in bars talk about their high school football days, but we do so for a reason -- those were good times to be in the market for Manhattan rental apartments. Not only were rents down -- or, at the very least, flat -- but concessions abounded from the bottom of the market to the top. As the renter's market has receded during the NYC rental market's return to form, those concessions have become harder nad harder to find. They're still out there, of course -- there are plenty of no-fee rental listings in Manhattan and, oddly enough, concessions are still available to find at new construction luxury rentals such as The Ohm and 808 Columbus Avenue -- but concessions have been harder and harder to come by in recent months, despite widespread hopes that there would be a concession bounce-back in the fall. Just-released fourth-quarter statistics make it plain -- the last few months have seen the number of concessions fall by more than half from where they were in January of 2010 and are roughly a third of what they were at the end of 2009. Good news for landlords, in short, but less so for those hunting for Manhattan rental apartments. Combine this with a bump in rents and a low vacancy rate, and it's hard to find a silver lining in all this. Luckily, it's out there.

Time flies when you're writing about real estate. It seems like only a few months ago that we had a post at the Luxury Rentals Manhattan blog entitled "Sad Landlords, Happy Renters." And that's because, as it turns out, it was only a few months ago -- it was only April that the renter's market for Manhattan rental listings was that robust. Since then, though, things have changed -- as the Manhattan real estate market has returned to health, the concessions, incentives and price breaks that defined the renter's market in Manhattan real estate have largely fallen by the wayside. This was already starting to happen back in May, and by late August we were writing mournful posts with titles like "Vacancies Down, Rents Up On NYC Apartments." The lessons of all this? For one, we obviously like that particular style of headline construction. But for another, despite the fact that there are still no-fee apartment listings and good deals on Manhattan rental apartments to be found out there, things have been trending in landlords' direction for some time. That doesn't make it any more exciting to read the New York Times' recent rundown of that situation, but it does at least make things less surprising. Good news, bad news, after the jump.

Like a heroine in a Russian novel, the Manhattan real estate market is never more lovely than when it's ailing. For NYC dwellers looking for Manhattan rental apartments, at least, a weak NYC rental market is a friendly NYC rental market, with all the rental concessions, no fee apartment listings and deals on Manhattan luxury rentals that entails. But while the economies of New York City and New York state are still struggling along, the NYC real estate scene has surged back to robust health in recent months. For landlords, this is great news. For people searching Manhattan rental listings, it's somewhat less so. The July New York City rental report by The Real Estate Group New York bears why that is -- the almost total disappearance of rental concessions, the scarcity of no-fee rental listings, and a modest but notable across-the-board hike in rents on Manhattan rental apartments. Read on, if you dare.

We've been writing about the renter's market in Manhattan rentals here at Luxury Rentals Manhattan for months now, but much of what we've been writing about the renter's market has been about its imminent end. Is it here yet? How about now? Maybe while we were at lunch? The answer to those (incessant) questions remains more or less the same: the market for rental apartments in Manhattan is still tilted towards renters, but it appears to be in the midst of a return to the mean. Which in turn means, as the New York Post reports today, that it's increasingly tough for NYC dwellers to get the sort of concessions on Manhattan rentals that they routinely received during the heyday of the renter's market. Using Clinton luxury rental success story 505 West 37th as a test case, the Post's Katherine Dykstra reports that while concessions are down, the market is not totally back to its boom-era levels.