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Bloomberg
Manhattan rents decreased in September, marking only the second time since February 2014 that median rents for the borough fell from a year earlier. That’s great if you’re single and earning $100,000 a year, or part of a household that spends $100,000 a year on rent.
For everybody else in New York, the new rental market data, published last week by appraisal firm Miller Samuel and brokerage Douglas Elliman, is closer to a meh. Rents aren’t rising as rapidly as they have in past years, but that doesn’t take the sting out of historically high housing costs or make Manhattan any less of a “gated suburb†for the affluent.
Median rents for the luxury market, defined by Miller Samuel as the top 10 percent of the market, were $8,121, down 2.8 percent from a year earlier. The median rent for a studio apartment was $2,636, down 3.5 percent. Miller Samuel’s data come from actual lease transactions reported by a diverse group of landlords, according to Jonathan Miller, the firm’s CEO.
The old rule of thumb that housing costs should account for no more than 30 percent of household income is imperfect but useful. You’d need an annual salary of $105,000 to make the median studio affordable. To afford the typical luxury apartment you’d need household income of more than $300,000.
Rents for two- and three-bedroom apartments, meanwhile, ticked up slightly. These trends shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been following the long arc of the city’s real estate market.