Rents rise across LI as high-end supply trails demand

Long Island’s newest and nicest apartments are being snapped up by young professionals and well-off people without children, thereby driving up the prices of the high-end rentals, Newsday reported. In Nassau County, the average rent for a units in multifamily buildings was $2,257 in the first quarter — that’s up 3.2 percent from a year ago and nearly 30 percent from five years earlier, according to a report real estate market research company Reis. Suffolk County saw similar increases. Long Island’s rental vacancy rate is at 2.9 percent, half the national rate of 5.9 percent. Developers are trying to meet demand, but units are still snapped up extremely quickly, experts said. Nearly 13,000 units have been approved for construction over the last 12 years and more than half of those have been construction according to Newsday. Another 10,000 rental units are in the approvals and construction pipeline.[Newsday]