Upper East Side Rents Stop Dropping, Finally: Study

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — In what may be one of the surest signs yet that New York City is beginning to recover from the pandemic, rent prices have stopped their precipitous fall — including on the Upper East Side, a new study found.

The new study by StreetEasy, released Wednesday, examined real estate listings across the city during the month of April.

It found that after declining for 12 consecutive months, asking rents stabilized in April, with the citywide median rent rising to $2,499 — $4 higher than in March.

That signals that the city's deal-filled market, a haven for prospective renters, is on its way out. Still, prices are a far cry from where they stood in 2019, before the pandemic, when the median rent was $2,800.

On the Upper East Side, the median asking rent last month was $2,398 — a barely-perceptible $2 drop from the first quarter of this year, when they stood at $2,400.

Home prices, meanwhile, have begun to tick up. The median asking price for an Upper East Side home last month was $1.6 million, compared to $1.5 million during the year's first quarter.

The Upper East Side had been among the city's most severely affected neighborhoods by the COVID-19-induced market slump, and the damage is still visible: asking rents in the neighborhood were nearly 24 percent lower last month than they were the previous year.

"All in all, it appears that the days of record low rents may be coming to an end," said StreetEasy economist Nancy Wu.

"Not on solid ground"

Still, Wu cautioned that New York is "not on solid ground just yet," citing high unemployment, a huge number of empty apartments and the likely persistence of work-from-home, which could shake up the city's geography.

Across Manhattan, median asking rents rose by $14 last month — up to $2,799. (The pre-pandemic figure, meanwhile, stood at $3,400.)

But "there are still deals to be had," StreetEasy writes, noting that a record-high 45.2 percent of Manhattan rentals offered at least a month of free rent as a concession in April.

Other notable trends include declining inventory as more available rentals get snatched up. Across the city, the number of open rentals shrunk by 26 percent last month compared to August's record high.

In Manhattan, there were 28,185 apartments up for rent last month — a 32 percent decline compared to August.

"The summertime, which in the past was peak renter season, will look very different this year," Wu said.

"Commute times have become obsolete for some, opening up flexibility for when to sign a lease. This means that city renters can take their time to move, and rents will creep back up slowly.”

Read the full StreetEasy report here.