NYC rentals show “surprising resilience” in first quarter: Reis

The city’s multi-family housing market kicked off the year with a “surprising show of resilience,” according to a first-quarter market report from research firm Reis, with apartment vacancies posting a slight decline to 2.8 percent and effective rents increasing 0.9 percent over their levels at the end of 2009. Whereas effective rents dropped on a year-over-year basis by 2.3 percent, the decline was just half that of last year’s, which, according to Reis research director Victor Canalog, indicates that “rent deterioration has not only slowed down but has reversed.” The trends in New York were similar to those seen nationwide, where apartment vacancies remained flat and effective rents rose by 0.3 percent from the quarter before. Of the 79 metro areas surveyed for the Reis report, 60 saw their effective apartment rents go up, which should help keep multi-family properties among the most attractive for financing from lenders, as Michael Stoler noted in today’s column for The Real Deal. The largest increase, 1.6 percent, was in Miami. “We remain of the belief that this is going to be a slow recovery,” Canalog said of the “uncommonly robust” first-quarter results. “Still, this quarter’s results taken as a whole are consistent with our expectation that the apartment sector will be the first to recover as the overall economy emerges from the recession,” he said. TRD