New York City Luxury Rental Blog Archives for January 2015

3 of Our Favorite Hotel-Apartment Buildings

Manhattan’s history of luxury hotels runs pretty deep, and they’ve been a mainstay for the past century, especially around Central Park.  Recently, New York City’s luxury hotels have found themselves on an uptick, with noticeably higher vacancy rates.

Competing for You: Developers Aim to Please with Amenities

Midtown's cityscape offers a variety of new constructions and older buildings.

Last year, Luxury Rentals Manhattan shared some of our favorite building amenities — and it took a while to put together, since there are so many great spaces out there — and that may be for a good reason.  “Amenity creep” is what the New York Times used to describe the trend (especially as it applies to Brooklyn and Queens as new construction rentals pop up on the waterfront) of developers using better amenities and services to attract renters.  To be sure, attracting tenants in such a demanding market segment has become progressively more difficult, and the developers’ collective response was to compete with the best fixtures in-unit, and best amenities in-building.

Rental Market Report: Outer Boroughs Hold Their Own

So we know that NYC has the sixth highest rental market in the nation (technically, the Northern New Jersey-New York area ranked sixth); Samuel Miller’s December 2014 rental report provided more insight into what exactly it looks like, and long story short: median rent levels went up as mean levels went down.

2014's Highest Rent Markets: Where Does NYC Rank?

Zillow calculated the average rents in the nation’s biggest metropolitan markets for 2014, and the NYC area doesn’t even rank in the highest five (pretty not bad for the country's most livable city).  As has been reported previously, California rents topped the list, occupying four out of the top five spots.  Curiously, San Francisco’s average ($1,598), which in previous months had beat out New York’s ($1,228), was actually the second highest — the region with the highest rents was actually San Jose, which was calculated to have an average monthly rent of $1,807.