Good luck finding an apartment in Manhattan. The borough may be full of ghost apartments but when it comes to rentals it has next to no vacancies. According to a new reports from Citi Habitats only .72 percent of Manhattan apartments were available in the last three months, the lowest they've seen since they started tracking the stat in 2002. At the same time the rent just keeps getting higher and higher—the average rent for a studio on the island is $1,976 per month, up 9.1 percent from last year!
And it gets worse (well, not for landlords). Three-bedroom apartments are running an average $4,985 a month (up 11.3 percent), two-bedrooms will cost you an average $3,757 (up 10.8 percent), and one-bedrooms average $2,676 (up 9.2 percent). If you are willing to live in a walk-up, the cost of a one-bedroom goes down to $2,476, but add a doorman and that price goes up another grand.
“A significant portion of those gains are because the landlord is not as worried about tenant retention and vacancy," Jonathan Miller, president of New York-based Miller Samuel, told Bloomberg. "There is no category that you can say that rents are cheaper than last year. It’s just not happening."
But while Manhattan rents are booming, sales are not. According to reports, sales of Manhattan co-ops and condos declined 3.8 percent in the second quarter from last year with the median price of apartments that sold dipping 5.5 percent to $850,000.
Suddenly that 78-square-foot Manhattan apartment seems less absurd. At what point do people start living in parking spots?
