Upper East Side Rents Plummeted In 2020, Study Finds

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The Upper East Side has seen one of the steepest declines in rent price of any neighborhood in New York City, with a whopping 23 percent drop compared to before the pandemic, a new report found.

The neighborhood saw its median rent price drop 22.6 percent 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.

That decline was among the highest in Manhattan, where collectively rents dropped by 12.7 percent between the two years — the most of any borough. In 2008, Manhattan rents dropped by about 10 percent.

"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.

Neighboring Roosevelt Island also saw a significant price drop of nearly 12 percent.

In Manhattan, the most widespread rent price drops occurred in Midtown, where nearly one in three landlords lowered 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.

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. In North Corona, Queens, for example, median rents rose this year by nearly 24 percent.

Anna Quinn contributed to this report.