Apartment rentals New York with Rental Market

In the long standing battle between landlords and tenants in New York City, the latter group of New Yorkers seem to have now found an unlikely new set of allies—the city’s mayoral candidates! In a recent public hearing conducted by the Rent Guidelines Board in Manhattan, three of the Democratic candidates for mayor, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and City Comptroller John Liu, said that they were against a proposed increase in the rents for rent-stabilized apartments in the city.

Without surprise, market reports released early in May revealed that Manhattan’s apartment rental rates are staying above pre-recession levels as they continued to climb throughout the month of April. As Luxury Rentals Manhattan has continuously reported, New York's lack of available rental units is the primary cause of these skyrocketing rates.

The National Association of Home Builders, in conjunction with Wells Fargo, released their monthly Housing Market Index last month, and the report, which gauges builder confidence in the housing market nationwide, provided some promising new information. Nationally, builder confidence in new construction is higher than it has been since before the market crash, and while the index number is still relatively low—standing in February at 29—it is on a consistently upward trajectory, and is now the highest it has been since May 2007. While the report does not touch on individual markets, it does imply good news for builders and renters of apartments in Manhattan.

The MNS rental market report for December 2012 is out, and with it come the kinds of numbers we expect to see in the winter months. You may remember from last month that prices hadn’t fallen in November nearly as far as real estate insiders generally expect them to. Part of the reason for this was extremely low inventory, which MNS, in addition to several key real estate industry forecasters, predicts will not change in 2012. But movement did slow down in December as people hunkered in for the holidays, and the numbers show a slight decline.  Throughout Manhattan, average prices for all luxury apartments for rent went down 1% from November rates. Certain Manhattan neighborhoods saw relatively large declines, while others showed very little. Still more neighborhoods saw increases in price, but by lower average numbers than the declines were. That said, prices in December 2011 are on average 8.4% higher than they were in December 2010, suggesting that the rental market overall is stronger than it was a year ago.