If you’re looking to rent on the Upper East Side or Soho and don’t need a doorman, now might be the time to make a move. While rents overall fell .6 percent in April, rents for non-doorman units on the Upper East Side fell 5.67 percent from a month ago, and non-doorman one-bedroom unit rents in Soho dropped 17 percent in the last six months, according to the Manhattan rental market report released today by the Real Estate Group of New York. Overall, the average rent in non-doorman Manhattan units fell 2.84 percent this month, while doorman unit rents rose .8 percent, and inventory across the board rose 3.84 percent. TRD Comments

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A New York City agent’s defamation case has been dismissed in the New York State Appellate Court, after a lower court had originally allowed the complaint to proceed. Christakis Shiamili, a principal broker with Ardor Realty, had sued the Real Estate Group New York, whose name recently changed to TDG/TREGNY, alleging that it had allowed “numerous false and defamatory statements” to be published on its site’s message board. Although the group had not published the statements itself, Shiamili claimed that it had encouraged the defamation by allowing the comments to remain online. The court, however, has halted the case on the grounds that the Federal Communications Decency Act blocks Shiamili’s complaint. The act states that providers of online content cannot “be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Shiamili did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Real Deal. TDG/TREGNY officials were out of the office and also could not be reached for comment by The Real Deal.

Residential brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman today released its
first-ever quarterly rental Manhattan market report, revealing an
eye-popping 58.3 percent drop in rental transactions from last year as
waves of unemployment battered the city. The report, which tracked data about the rental market that has never
before been published, determined that 2,346 apartments were rented in
the second quarter of 2009, down from 5,624 during the same quarter of
2008. That drop coincided with a 17.5 percent decrease in the average
rental price per square foot to $44.16, from $53.50 in the prior-year
quarter. Meanwhile, the number of rental listings swelled by nearly a
third to 7,290 from 5,658 in second-quarter 2008. Though the rental market has been widely believed to be healthier than the sales market, the results largely mirrored the slowdown shown in recent sales reports, said Jonathan Miller, the president of real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel, who prepared the report. [more]

Brooklyn-based
brokerage the Developers Group is merging with Manhattan’s Real Estate
Group of New York, creating one firm with reach in two markets. The new
firm, temporarily known as TDG/TREGNY, has 70 agents. Financial terms
of the merger were not released. Daniel Baum, co-founder of the Real
Estate Group, will be the CEO of the new firm. The
Developers Group was founded six years ago and specializes in marketing
new developments in Brooklyn, while the Real Estate Group, founded in
2004, focuses on Manhattan rentals.