Upper East Side Rents Continue Falling In 2021, Study Shows

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — As New York City rents continue to drop in year two of the pandemic, the Upper East Side has been no exception, with prices in the neighborhood dropping even further in 2021, according to a new study.

The new study by StreetEasy, released Friday, examined real estate listings across the city during the first quarter of 2021.

It found that rents in much of the city are lower than they have been in years, continuing a pattern that began in the early days of COVID-19. In Manhattan, the median asking rent was $2,700 — the lowest figure on record.

On the Upper East Side, the median asking rent was $2,400 this quarter — more than 22 percent lower than last year's figure.

Home sales, too, have taken a hit: the neighborhood's median asking price was $1,499,000 in the first quarter of 2021, down more than nine percent from last year's.

Those decreases ranked among the highest in the borough — only a handful of Lower Manhattan neighborhoods, including Nolita, the Lower East Side and Little Italy, saw bigger rent drops this year.

Upper East Side rents were lower, too, than they had been in StreetEasy's last market report for the final quarter of 2020, when they stood at $2,450 — signaling a continuing trend.

"A sense of normalcy"

Other boroughs have had meaningful drops as well. Brooklyn's median asking rent of $2,390 is its lowest since 2011, while Queens dropped to $1,999 — the first time it has been below $2,000 in eight years, according to the report.

Manhattan's most modest drops occurred in Upper Manhattan, where rents fell by only 9.4 percent in the area that includes Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood. Still, the $2,700 median rent in Upper Manhattan is its lowest figure since 2015.

Meanwhile, some outer-borough neighborhoods failed to drop at all: North Corona, Queens and Marine Park in Brooklyn both saw rents rise by upwards of 16 percent compared to 2020.

According to StreetEasy economist Nancy Wu, the low rents could last into the summer as vaccinated New Yorkers begin to move around and put their apartments up for lease.

"With the weather getting warmer and more people rolling up their sleeves to get vaccinated, New Yorkers are starting to feel a sense of normalcy," Wu said. "As this continues, the rate at which apartments come off the market will continue to ramp up."

As the city recovers from the crisis, however, the rental market will likely return to normalcy more quickly than the sales market — and "competition will slowly start to pick up," Wu said.

Read the full StreetEasy report here.