Manhattan’s median rent ended 2020 down by 17.3 percent, but the sales market showed signs of life in the other boroughs.
The rental and sales markets in New York City are poised to travel two very different paths in 2021: Deep and persisting discounts in parts of the rental market, with the possibility of a rebound in the sales market — albeit centered on the boroughs beyond Manhattan.
Citywide, many landlords in December continued to offer discounts not seen since the Great Recession. The median rental price in Manhattan, including sweeteners like several months of covered rent, was $2,800 a month, down 17.3 percent from the same time the previous year.
That is marginally better than in November, when Manhattan rents dropped a record 21.7 percent from the same time in 2019, but it’s hardly a reversal from past months, said Jonathan J. Miller, the appraiser who wrote the report for Douglas Elliman.
“I think we need to be clear: This is not a recovery, this is an early step in the right direction,” he said. “Even with some metrics showing improvement, they’re still terrible.”
There was a burst of new leasing activity in Manhattan in the final months of 2020, spurred by rarely seen discounts and immense inventory. There were 5,459 new leases signed in December, a generally slow time of the year, the most signings for that month in more than 12 years, Mr. Miller said, which could reflect new demand.
It was still a drop in the bucket. There were 13,718 listings for rent in December, up 172 percent from the same time the year before, and the vacancy rate, 5.5 percent, was the third highest on record. And it’s likely that there are even more listings being held off the market, because of the supply glut.
Discounts were also widespread beyond Manhattan. In Brooklyn, the December median rent, including concessions, was $2,564 in Brooklyn, down 11.4 percent from a year ago. In northwest Queens, where the bulk of new rental development was centered, the median rent fell to $2,166, a nearly 18 percent drop from a year ago, according to the Douglas Elliman report. (The Bronx and Staten Island were not covered in the report.)
But the discounts were not universal, and, in fact, were largely absent in some of the neighborhoods hardest hit by Covid, in predominantly Black, Hispanic and immigrant communities in central Queens and the Bronx. Rents there, including Corona in Queens and Norwood in the Bronx, fell only 1 percent from February to November, according to an analysis by the listing website StreetEasy.
And even with the passing of a new tenant protection law in late December, which extended a moratorium on most evictions, there are hundreds of thousands of tenants statewide who remain at risk of losing their homes, because of lost income.
Source: nytimes.com
