Apartment rentals New York with Renting Versus Buying

If you’ve been thinking about taking the plunge and buying a new luxury condo, now is an excellent time to plant your stake in Manhattan. New York City real estate has been long regarded for its reliability as a safe and stable investment, and a reported market softening indicates uniquely opportune timing to buy a new apartment.

For a city that’s known for its sheer number of renters, it’s good to know that some of New York City’s most powerful citizens are living in the city as tenants as well. From mayoral hopefuls to sitting Congressmen, there are a number of politicians in New York who are choosing to rent an apartment, instead of buying one. Some of these apartments are rent-stabilized, and others are condominium residences—our politicians seem to be very particular on where they rent in the city.

One of the perks to living in New York City, besides the bagels and the halal carts, is that sooner or later, one is bound to run into some famous celebrity out and about in the city. Some lucky New Yorkers have stumbled onto a movie set in Midtown West and met one of the stars of “Ocean’s Eleven,” while others have been flabbergasted to realize that they have been shopping alongside a “real housewife” in a trendy Manhattan store on Fifth Avenue. But there are some among us who haven’t yet seen a star in the city yet. So, if you are a New York City resident who hasn’t had a chance celebrity encounter to share with friends yet, we have a suggestion to help you in your star quest.

The Manhattan real estate market is a complicated thing, as any regular Luxury Rentals Manhattan visitor -- and anyone who has ever tried to find a rental apartment in Manhattan -- could tell you. But one of the most peculiar features of the ongoing turnaround in the Manhattan rental marketplace is just how much more quickly the market for high-end Manhattan luxury rentals has turned around than has, say, the market for $2500-per-month Manhattan rental apartments. Given that there are more people in New York capable of paying more modest monthly rents than there are those willing or able to cut five-figure checks on the first of each month, the turnaround would seem to be somewhat backwards. But this is Manhattan real estate, and the top-down turnaround has become both harder and harder to ignore and -- per a recent New York Times report -- even more pronounced in the early months of summer. The demand for five-figure NYC rental apartments has been higher than that for smaller, less expensive Manhattan apartments.  So, what exactly does this mean for Manhattan real estate?

We take a certain amount of pride here at the Luxury Rentals Manhattan blog in providing well-written posts on news and trends in Manhattan real estate, even if a strangely large amount of those posts winds up being about food for some reason. But we know when we're beat. This is one of those times. A recent study by real estate research clearing house Trulia revealed something that we at the LRM blog have written about previously -- namely, that it is exponentially wiser to rent a Manhattan apartment than it is to buy a Manhattan apartment, for a number of reasons. The Trulia report reveals that this remains true in New York City, and notably more true in New York City than anywhere else in the United States. Unfortunately for us, it does so in the handy, eye-catching graphic you see above, which illustrates the disparity in rent-to-buy price ratio in New York City and other United States real estate markets. You're looking at that image right now, aren't you? No, that's fine. It's a pretty great image. So great, in fact, that it more or less obviates the need for any words, per the usual one picture: 1000 words ratio. But let's press on, and provide a little more detail.