New York City Luxury Rental Blog Archives for January 2011

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.

Lower East Side luxury rental The Ludlow has more than one thing going for it, but among these is a location couldn't be more quintessentially Lower East Side. The blockbuster new LES rental sits just on the south side of Houston Street, across the street from the iconic (and incredibly delicious) Katz's Deli (and a short walk from such other old-school LES food landmarks as Russ and Daughters and Yonah Schimmel Knishery) and a short walk from circa-now LES haunts as varied as the posh Rivington Hotel and pioneering rock venue/bakery Cake Shop. But while few Lower East Side rental listings can boast quite as iconically a Lower East Side address as The Ludlow, the new construction luxury rental building has always seemed something of an outlier. The tallest building for blocks around, the stylish, glassy Ludlow couldn't look less like the humble ex-tenements that surround it. Which is a compliment of sorts, because The Ludlow is pretty great looking and Katz's (while incredibly delicious) is decidedly not. Instead of lording its good looks over the 'hood, though, The Ludlow is trying to be a good neighbor on the Lower East Side. At least when it comes to pet-related policies.

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.