April rents smash records in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens

Record-smashing rents reigned in New York City last month.

April prices upped the ante immediately after the Manhattan median rent in March topped last summer’s high. The borough’s median rent broke a fresh record at $4,241, according to a report by the appraiser Jonathan Miller for Douglas Elliman.

Leases with concessions weren’t any cheaper. The median net effective rent on those deals was a record $4,205 as landlords extended the fewest months of free rent since November 2019.

Brooklyn and Northwest Queens — the other city markets covered by the report — also notched all-time highs.

In Kings County the median rent hit $3,500 as the net effective rent rose to $3,473. Northwest Queens saw those metrics peak at $3,525 and $3,484, respectively.

Despite those staggering numbers, the pace of the city’s growth has continued to slow year-over-year.

Last month, Manhattan prices were 8 percent higher than a year earlier — the first single-digit increase since September 2021. By contrast, annual rent growth peaked at nearly 32 percent last April as pandemic discounts were reversed.

Month-over-month rent growth has hovered around 2 percent since peaking last July. In April, rents rose 1.6 percent from March, a slower rate than the 1.9 percent rise from February to March.

Miller has characterized this as rents moving sideways: Prices may edge up to a record high in any given month, but have effectively plateaued for more than half a year.

The rise in rents comes as state legislators rejected a plan by the governor to increase housing supply in the city by setting growth targets, incentivizing office conversions, extending a tax break for rental development, and allowing the city to raise its residential density cap and to legalize basement dwellings.

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