Midtown Rents Plummeted In 2020, Study Finds

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NY — Midtown has seen one of the steepest declines in rent price of any neighborhood in New York City, with asking prices across the neighborhood dropping by more than 20 percent compared to before the pandemic, a new report found.

Each part of the neighborhood saw its median rent price plummet between November 2019 and 2020, according to the StreetEasy's November 2020 Market Reports, which found that rents across New York City have fallen more this year than they did during the Great Recession.

Here is the breakdown by each part of Midtown included in the report:

• Midtown: 21.3 percent drop ($3,500 median asking rent)
• Midtown East: 23.6 percent drop ($2,750 median asking rent in Nov. 2020)
• Midtown South: 22 percent drop ($3,131 median asking rent)
• Midtown West: 20.8 percent drop ($2,850 median asking rent)

Across Manhattan, rents collectively dropped by 12.7 percent between the two years — the most of any borough. In 2008, Manhattan rents fell by about 10 percent.

Midtown also saw the most widespread rent price drops anywhere in the borough, with nearly one in three landlords lowering their prices. The biggest single drop of any neighborhood, though, was in SoHo, which had an astonishing 37.8 percent decline in prices last month compared to November 2019.

"We expected the rental market to match the weakness seen during the Great Recession, but the fact that the market has surpassed that level in less than one year shows how serious the crisis caused by the pandemic has been," StreetEasy Economist Nancy Wu said in the report.

Wu predicted that rents will remain low and vacant units will continue to abound until the coronavirus vaccine becomes more widely available.

Meanwhile, some outer-borough neighborhoods did not see the same drops that occurred in Manhattan, despite being some of the hardest-hit neighborhoods by the coronavirus. In North Corona, Queens, for example, median rents rose this year by nearly 24 percent.

Read the full StreetEasy report here.

Anna Quinn contributed to this report.