Manhattan apartment rents rose the most in five years as would-be homeowners struggling to get mortgages lingered in the leasing market, competing for space with transplants and new college graduates.
he median monthly rent climbed 7.9 percent in the second quarter from a year earlier to $3,125, according to a report today by appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and broker Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate. It was the biggest jump since the second quarter of 2007, when rents rose 11 percent. The median is 4.3 percent below the peak of $3,265 in 2006, and poised to surpass it, said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel.
Tenants renewing two-year leases should expect price increases of about 13 percent from June 2010, according to brokerage MNS, which also released a rental-market report today.
The smallest apartments had the largest rent increases in the quarter as tenant demand for cheaper options surged. The median monthly price of a studio jumped 15 percent from a year earlier to $2,395, while one-bedroom units climbed 8.5 percent to $3,250. Two-bedroom rents rose 5 percent to $4,298, while three-bedroom prices were unchanged at $5,295.
Christopher DosSantos had to increase his budget and change his neighborhood of choice to land an apartment. DosSantos, a law student at Fordham University, and his friend Dean Saccomanno, who’s studying dentistry at New York University, sought a two-bedroom rental in Greenwich Village for no more than $2,400 a month. They increased the limit to $3,000 after seeing the “shoeboxes” available at the lower price, said DosSantos, 23.
When Graham Marvin spotted a $1,895-a-month, two-bedroom walk-up on the Upper East Side, he applied immediately, armed with paperwork showing that his parents would act as guarantors. Marvin, 22, a recent graduate of NYU’s film school who works for a company creating a show for the History Channel, still didn’t get the place.
The rejection led him farther east — away from the subway, restaurants and bars — to an “awkwardly shaped” unit on 82nd Street near York Avenue that he and a friend agreed to rent for $1,900. The second-floor apartment in a building without an elevator requires a walk through one of the bedrooms to get to the kitchen.
The downtown neighborhoods of Soho and Tribeca commanded the highest rents for almost every size apartment, with one- bedrooms leasing for an average of $3,877, two-bedrooms for $6,290 and three-bedrooms for $9,012, Citi Habitats said. Studios in those downtown neighborhoods rented for an average of $2,500 a month, a price topped only by Chelsea, where studios rented for $2,553 in the quarter.
On the Upper West Side, average rents ranged from $1,980 for a studio to $6,339 for a three-bedroom apartment.
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