New York City loves to buck a trend and do things its own way — even when it comes to rental trends.
While rents across the nation fall, the price tag that comes with living in the Big Apple has gone up, again.
Rental rates across the top 50 metros declined an average of 1.1% from December 2023, but New York City saw a 5.6% increase, according to the latest Realtor.com report.
One of the major factors driving rent prices down across the country is the glut of new construction that’s just now hitting the market — something that’s in limited supply in the dense streets of New York City.
That increase in housing stock has led to an overall nationwide decrease in absorption rate — that is, the number of newly built rentals leased out within three months of completed construction.
The only place where the absorption rate has gone up is in the Northeast, where it jumped from 58% to 67% year over year.
The national absorption rate is 55%, which reflects a rebalancing of the market to pre-COVID-19 pandemic conditions.
The national median asking price for rent is $1,695, the lowest since April 2022.
But in New York City, the median rent for a 0-2 bedroom dwelling in the city is now $2,967.
Rents in Manhattan are especially steep, with the overall median rent at $4,487 a month, a 5.4% year-over-year increase.
The median rent for a 0-2 bedroom in Manhattan jumped a staggering 9% year over year, to $4,387, while the median rent for a 3-plus-bedroom is now $7,091, a 0.8% increase from December 2023.
“There seems to be a trend of smaller units receiving more demand in Manhattan than in the other, more affordable boroughs,” says Realtor.com senior economist Joel Berner. “This could be a sign that there’s renewed interest from young people moving into the city recently, while Manhattan rents had stayed pretty flat following the pandemic recovery period.”
By the boroughs
The report shows that the market is starting to balance itself out, with rents growing in all five boroughs at more similar rates than earlier in 2024.
In most boroughs, rental properties are staying on the market for much longer than they did at the previous time last year.
Rentals in Brooklyn averaged 48 days on the market (a 60% increase year over year), while Manhattan listings averaged 51 days on the market — a 104% increase year over year.
In Queens, apartments are on the market for an average of 46 days, a 39% increase, and Staten Island rentals average 36 days on the market, a 12.5% year-over-year increase.
Only the Bronx saw a slight decrease in days on the market, averaging 38 days, a 1.3% decline.
As for pricing, in December 2024, the median asking rent in Manhattan (the most expensive borough) reached $4,530, an increase of 2.1% from November and 6.4% from December 2023.
Rent in Brooklyn (the second most expensive borough) grew 2.9% month over month and 5.8% year over year.
Until December, rent growth in New York City had been primarily driven by the less-expensive boroughs, which fell less during the pandemic and picked up pace through 2024.
Meanwhile, the Bronx saw its lowest year-over-year rent growth (4%) since March 2022, though it still exceeds December 2019 by 46.2%.