Apartment rentals New York with Average Manhattan Rents

City Comptroller John Liu released a report last Wednesday stating that rising rents are increasingly putting pressure on middle-class families. The new report showed that half of all city households typically spend more than 30% of their income on rent alone, compared to 26% nationally. Rent becomes officially unaffordable when it goes over 30%, according to federal benchmarks. Middle-income apartment renters, defined as people earning between $35,000 and $75,000 annually, face the most pressure in Manhattan, where 45% pay rent that falls into the officially unaffordable bracket. This high rent is unfortunately not unique to Manhattan apartments however. Rents have also been creeping up in Staten Island and Queens, where 44% of the middle-class residents are shouldering unaffordable housing costs.

The autumn winds are descending on New York City, which can only mean one thing--there’s a storm coming. Fall is a banner season for the Manhattan rental market, and projections for the final three months of 2012 look to heighten this precedent. Rental prices hit a record high in July, totalling about $3,459 per month. That’s an astounding sum to pay for a single apartment. Before you head out to the nearest agency, be prepared to encounter stricter lease requirements. Now that the market is on fire, landlords are allowed to demand the very best of their tenants.

With many of Manhattan’s popular neighborhoods getting denser by the day, it is only natural that people looking for homes in the city are looking for newer, but traditionally overlooked, neighborhoods to move into. One such neighborhood, which has found many takers among the renters of New York City, is the quiet yet evolving locality of Hamilton Heights in West Harlem. With Manhattanville on one end and Washington Heights on the other, Hamilton Heights is in the midst of a revival of sorts, with people coming in to the neighborhood to make use of its low rents and great living atmosphere. The average rent of a one-bedroom apartment here comes to $1,600, whereas buying a townhouse would cost you about $1 million, a fraction of the cost of a similar home in Brooklyn.

Tough economic times have caused New Yorkers to tighten their purse strings, and some of the ones bearing the brunt of these hard times are New York’s real estate brokers. In a recent survey conducted by Rent.com, four out of ten New Yorkers said that they would not like to pay a broker’s fee when they look for an apartment. In a city where finding a rental is often fraught with difficulties, city residents don’t seem to want to have the broker’s fee added on to their list of expenses. The broker’s fee is typically about 15 percent of an apartment’s yearly rent, but with the double whammy of a surge in rents and a dip in vacancies in the city, New Yorkers are holding on to all their dollars to make sure they can afford their homes.

It’s a fundamental rule of the world: high demand = high prices. And with demand for new rentals in Manhattan at an absolute peak, this rule is certainly holding up. With a relative decrease in the amount of new construction over recent years, any open rental apartment in Manhattan is greatly desired, so it's no wonder that the rents keep rising. The city’s vacancy rate fell to .89% in May, a clear indication that the market's few listings are in high demand. Yet while exorbitantly high rent may be a difficult aspect for many to deal with, there are always ways to find comfortable and affordable living situations in Manhattan.