Manhattan apartment rents up, vacancies down: report

Source: TREGNY

The
Manhattan residential rental market showed modest improvement over the
last month, with inventory declining and rents climbing in both
month-over-month and year-over-year comparisons, according to the Real
Estate Group NY’s July report, which measures rental activity from June 15 to July
15 (see full report below). The largest year-over-year rent hikes were
seen amongst non-doorman studios, which averaged $2,077 per month, up
6.06 percent from July
2009. Meanwhile, prices for studios with doormen, averaging $2,367 per
month, rose by just 1.29 percent — the smallest increase of the
apartment types. Neighborhoods still offering deals even as the overall
market rebounds include the Lower East Side, where non-doorman,
two-bedroom units saw rents fall 9.52 percent in July
to $2,770 per month and Harlem, where rents for two-bedroom units with
doormen declined by 9.69 percent to $2,345 per month — the lowest
price since TREGNY began tracking data for the neighborhood in 2008.
The data reflects trends from roughly 10,000 listings in TREGNY’s
proprietary database in the borough, all priced under $10,000 per
month. Overall, vacancies declined by 0.78 percent month-over-month in
Manhattan, which TREGNY attributed to recent college graduates entering
the rental market and to would-be intra-borough renters who are now
staying in Manhattan as landlord incentives in the outer boroughs have
decreased. In a recent second-quarter rental report, Prudential
Douglas Elliman found that although rental activity had returned to
pre-recession levels, average rental prices were relatively flat in
Manhattan, declining 3.3 percent on a year-over-year basis but
increasing 12.3 percent on a per-square-foot basis
quarter-over-quarter. TRD