Manhattan Rents Hit New High With No Relief For Tenants In Sight

The median apartment rent in Manhattan reached a new monthly record in February, an ominous sign amid slowing housing construction and stubbornly high housing prices.

The median Manhattan apartment rented for $4,500 last month, breaking the previous all-time high in August 2023 of $4,400, according to data from brokerage Douglas Elliman.

“Usually the seasonal peak of prices is in the summer,” said Miller Samuel CEO Jonathan Miller, who authors the report every month for Douglas Elliman. “I think this infers that there's probably going to be more records set during the year.”

The median rental price in the borough was 6.4% higher than at the same point a year earlier. Rent per SF also increased by 7.6% to $90.65, while Manhattan's vacancy rate fell by 0.9% in that same period.

Those figures hitting new highs so early in the year indicate that rent growth is likely to skyrocket even higher when peak leasing season hits New York City in the late spring through the summer, Miller said.

“It's just unusual to see records set early in the year, before the spring market, and especially before summer,” he said.

Demand was driven by mortgage rates continuing to keep would-be buyers stuck in the rental market as well as potential buyers procrastinating on decisions in anticipation of market volatility in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, Miller said.

Rates for 30-year mortgages are hovering at 6.7%, while the median sale price of a Manhattan home in February was $1.3M, according to Redfin. Meanwhile, last week’s tariff chaos left analysts and consumers with “major whiplash.”

“I describe the current economy as peak uncertainty,” Miller said. “When consumers are uncertain, they tend to pause.”

Demand for Manhattan apartments also increased in luxury buildings, where units commanded median monthly rents of $10,600, representing an 8.4% increase from a year prior, the data shows. The price per SF for luxury apartments was $104.86, a full 14.6% higher than February 2024.

“This is the highest rent per foot we've tracked,” Miller said. “On the other hand, inventory fell pretty sharply for luxury. It's down 15.6% year-over-year, so the market remains pretty tight.”

Median rents in Brooklyn were $3,600 a month in February, representing a 2.9% increase year-over-year. The price per SF for Brooklyn rentals was up 7% from a year earlier. 

In northwest Queens, which includes Long Island City, Astoria, Woodside and Sunnyside, February’s median rents were 7% up at $3,466 and per SF price rose 2.6%.

Along with November, February is “typically the softest month in the year,” Hal Gazvie, executive vice president of residential leasing at Douglas Elliman, told Bisnow. But 2025 is already shaping up to be a year of bidding wars, and renters are trying to get ahead of it.

“They're reaching out to agents now, but they're looking for May and June,” he said.

A record 26.8% of Manhattan apartments leased during the quarter involved a bidding war, Miller said. Brooklyn broke records for the highest proportion of bidding wars for apartments for the second month running. Renters went head to head for 35.1% of leases signed in the borough in February, up from 31% last month.

A little over one in five units in Queens, roughly 21.4%, leases involved tenants trying to outbid one another.

Overall, bidding wars were most prevalent for studios and one-bedrooms at entry-level prices, Gazvie said.

The city's historically low vacancy rates for apartments, coming in at 1.4% during the most recent official count last spring, are likely fueling some of the rent growth as demand remains high while supply remains limited, he said.

NYC is still behind on its housing production goals, with a 58% decrease between 2024 and 2023 for new building filings, according to data from the Real Estate Board of New York.

“The rents are still exorbitantly high, from year over year,” Gazvie said. “We're still, I think, 20% or higher than where rents were in 2019.”