‘Couldn’t Decline’
“They made us an offer, and it was an offer that we couldn’t decline,” said Siegel, 22, the assistant general manager of Pondicheri restaurant, a few blocks from the apartment. Her roommate is the pastry chef. “We were actually walking away to see another place and we just stopped and turned around.”
Last month, landlords whittled an average of 3.3 percent off their asking prices, compared with 2.5 percent a year earlier, according to Miller Samuel and Douglas Elliman. On top of that, they offered concessions such as a free month or payment of broker’s fees on 26 percent of all new leases, the second highest share in the firm’s records.
Median rents for two-bedroom apartments fell 5.2 percent from a year earlier to $4,500, the firms said. One-bedroom costs slipped 1.3 percent to $3,350, and the median for units with three bedrooms or more dropped 3.7 percent to $6,031.
“It’s morphing from a market behavior of more isolated segments to something more universal,” said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel. “The softening of the rental market is not a passing phase.”
Brooklyn Rents
In Brooklyn, home to its own apartment-construction boom, rents also fell across all apartment sizes last month. Studios dropped 1.4 percent to $2,363, while one-bedrooms slipped 0.4 percent to $2,600, Miller Samuel and Douglas Elliman said. Two-bedrooms had the biggest decline, sliding 5.3 percent to $3,000.
Almost 16 percent of new leases in Brooklyn had concessions, up from 13 percent in February 2016. There were 2,354 listings on the market at the end of last month, a 17 percent jump.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.