LIC Homes Are More Expensive Than Pre-Pandemic, Study Finds

LONG ISLAND CITY, QUEENS — Finding an apartment in New York City might feel harder than ever, but rent in many neighborhoods is cheaper than it was before the pandemic — except in Long Island City, a new study found.

During the third quarter of 2021, the median rent in Long Island City surpassed 2019 prices by $70 and 2020 prices by $445, as some of the city’s popular commuter neighborhoods rebound from the effects of the pandemic, the StreetEasy data shows.

“There’s a mass migration of people coming back into the city, and many are choosing to go to Long Island City,” Mark Metzger, a real-estate agent at Bond New York, told Curbed over the summer, as workers who fled NYC during the pandemic began to return.

Metzger compared Long Island City to Williamsburg or Greenpoint in terms of its appeal among the city’s young workers and (arguably easier) commute to Manhattan; both Williamsburg and Greenpoint, as well as other commuter neighborhoods like Downtown Brooklyn, are seeing rents this quarter that exceed pre-pandemic prices, the study found.

Two of the biggest rent rebounds happened in the Flatiron District and the Financial District; neighborhoods that are situated amid the high-rise office buildings of Midtown and Downtown, respectively. The study found that rents this quarter surpassed 2019 prices by $494 in the Flatiron District and a whopping $634 in the Financial District.

And those rental incentives in Long Island City, including months of free rent, are a thing of the past, too, the study found.

During the second quarter of this year, Queens was the outer borough with the highest share of apartments offering rental incentives; 26.8 percent of rentals came with some sort of deal.

Now, in this year’s third quarter, only 17.1 percent of apartments offer rental deals, making Queens the borough with the lowest share of rental incentives citywide, according to StreetEasy.

Renting in much of the rest of the city, however, remains cheaper than pre-pandemic.

That includes Astoria where asking rents are $25 more than they were last year, but remain $132 less than they were two years ago.

The market, however, still benefits “highly mobile renters who can afford the most expensive areas” and are willing to do “everything they can to snag a lease in the neighborhood of their choosing,” StreetEasy economist Nancy Wu said. She expects this trend will continue until winter, when fewer people are typically looking to move.

People with a lower budget should not be discouraged, Wu said, but should keep in mind that any given apartment probably has multiple people vying for it already.

"Use all the tools at your disposal to your advantage during the rental search to help save you time and money," Wu said

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