There are some parts of New York City where, if you live there long enough, it actually makes more sense to buy rather than rent.
StreetEasy conducted a study featuring a metric called “Tipping Point,” looking at how long a person has to rent in a certain neighborhood before it becomes a better deal to buy. The neighborhood with the shortest tipping point in the city is Inwood in Upper Manhattan. The median asking rent in that particular neighborhood is $1,800 a month, while the median sales price is $453,000. StreetEasy’s study found a person would only have to rent in the area for 1.6 years before it became a better deal to buy.
Morningside Heights — where the median rent is $3,250 and the median sales price is $717,500 — has a tipping point of 3.5 years. Central Harlem’s tipping point is 3.8 years, according to the website, because the median rent there is $2,200 and the median sales price is $532,500.
On the other end of the spectrum is Lower Manhattan. The financial district has a tipping point of 19 years, well above the borough’s overall tipping point of 9.2 years, according to the website.
Brooklyn, which has been home to renters and buyers priced out of Manhattan for years now, has an overall tipping point of 3.6 years.
Fort Greene has the best deal for buyers in all of Brooklyn. With the median rental price at $2,995 and a sales price of $682,720, you would need to live in the neighborhood for just 2.6 years before it would make more sense to buy.
Though rents in Brooklyn and Manhattan are high, they are actually trending downward. A recent study from Douglas Elliman found that Manhattan’s residential landlords are now offering concessions to renters at record levels.
According to the report, the median net effective rent in Manhattan was $3,322 in the third quarter. Brooklyn’s median net effective rent was $2,841. [Curbed] — Miriam Hall