Daily NYC Apartment Listings & Advice
The cover story of this week’s Time Out NY is all about rents falling throughout the city. For the most part, the reportage was well-done and non-alarmist and there was some practical info on how to speak with your landlord about getting a reduction.
Read the article Here and Here and take a look at my coverage on the fall of the rental market and how to negotiate with your landlord.
I saw this via a link on Brownstoner . The NY Post reports that a city initiative will have the owners greening large older buildings with environmentally-friendly and energy-saving capital improvements. Tenant advocates were concerned that the costs of these improvements would be passed on to rent controlled tenants. Instead, the mayor’s pointman for this initiative, Rogit Aggarwala, states that city leaders pledge to prevent costs being passed on because increased energy efficiency soon pays for itself.
Clicking around today on Curbed, I came across a link to an awesome letter that a Wall Street Journal blogger wrote to her landlord when they received a lease renewal with an increase this past winter. How did the blogger get a $300 rent reduction? By writing a rational, well-researched letter. She spoke to recent arrivals in her building to find out what they were paying, checked out Craigslist, cited articles in the newspaper and in the end was happy with her savings.
Listen HERE to Curbed.com’s editor Lockhart Steele discussing the rental market, including the issue of negotiating with your landlord or moving out into a more affordable unit. There’s a lot of great stuff as readers share their experiences in the comments section.
It’s no secret that Manhattan rental vacancy rates have been rising since the end of the summer. I post the Citi Habitats monthly market reports on this blog every other month (August can be found here; June can be found here and October’s stats should be coming out any day now) and the statistics show that there are more apartments sitting empty in the city than we’ve seen in a long time. But when it comes to the actual cost of these vacancies, for landlords and for the city’s economy, The Observer really spells it out: “It’s easy to forget that these are more than abstract numbers, but rather indicators with immense financial ramifications for landlords with slim balance sheets. At a 5 percent vacancy rate, a landlord with 1,000 units would have 50 unoccupied residences; now, if the vacancy rate jumped to 10 percent, the landlord would have another 50 vacant apartments. If the landlord’s apartments averaged $2,500 in monthly rent, the owner would be losing an extra $125,000 a month in income, and $1.5 million annually.” There’s no doubt that smaller landlords could be struggling and while this may be hard for rent-weary tenants to believe, rising fuel costs and the difficulty of maintaining 100 and 200 year old buildings are making it tougher and tougher for the small-time landlord with just a building or two to make any money at all. Read the full Observer article here.
A poster over on the brownstoner forum asks whether it’s worth asking their landlord to reduce the rent. Read the full thread here.
FYI–The NY State court of appeals has ruled that lease-breaking is a no go. Even if you leave you are still financially responsible for fulfilling the terms of the lease and pay through its date of expiry. More info via City Limits, with extra coverage over at brownstoner.
Courtesy of Apartment Therapy. Obviously, the top five things are not the same for everyone but there were a lot of repeats: on-site laundry, nice kitchens and baths, aesthetically neutral decor and storage space were high on many people’s lists. What are the main features you desire in a rental apartment?
There’s an article in the New York Sun today about the Rentometer! This handy website has been on the sidebar of this blog since day one and is one of my favorite web-based real estate tools. It provides great and accurate free information to tenants and landlords alike and the creators of the site plan on adding more features, including listings. I was glad to read that rentometer.com also has a sister site, rentomatic, offering services for landlords, such as online rent payment. It is one of my hopes that the rental business can move in the direction of less paper and more web-based systems. Particularly in New York where so many people come from elsewhere for a few short days to rent apartments before moving here permanently, it would be fantastic if prospective tenants could easily go through more of the rental process via the web.
Based in Brooklyn, the Reclaimed Home blog is a great resource for DIY-ers who want to make their apartment renovations green and thrifty at the same time. The site offers an especially interesting perspective on the rental market because this blogger is also a landlord! This past week, Reclaimed Home had an analysis of the blogger’s own experience as a landlord in Bed Stuy who has seen her pool of eager tenants growing exponentially over the past 2 years. Her theory on the reason more renters are choosing Bed Stuy? She thinks that potential renters are being lured to the neighborhood with Dinner parties! Maybe she’s right?
