Upper East Side Rents Keep Rising As Vacant Homes Vanish: Study

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — Finding a place to live on the Upper East Side just keeps getting harder, as rents and home prices continue rising amid the city's pandemic recovery, according to a new report.

The study by StreetEasy looked at thousands of apartment listings around the city during the month of October. It found that the number of available rentals across the five boroughs had shrunk dramatically compared to last year, when the COVID-19-induced market had dropped rents to stunningly low levels.

Manhattan has seen the steepest inventory drop of any borough: the number of rentals on the market plummeted by 68 percent to 13,048 homes last month — its fewest since December 2012, the study found. (Excluding April 2020, when New York had just shut down as the virus spread.)

On the Upper East Side, the median asking rent in October was $2,950 — an 18 percent increase from the same period last year, and a $200 jump from this past August.

Home prices, too, are on the rise: last month's median asking price of $1,695,000 was 13 percent higher than it was at the same time in 2020.

While the number of available homes in other boroughs has also shrunk, the drop has not been nearly as severe as in Manhattan — a trend that researchers attribute to Manhattanites who fled during the pandemic.

"Transient Manhattan renters were most likely to leave the city, either temporarily or permanently, during the height of the pandemic," StreetEasy economist Nancy Wu said in the report.

"That drove the highest share of rental vacancies in Manhattan among the boroughs. It’s why we’re now seeing Manhattan’s inventory experience bigger swings and more dramatic changes as it recovers — because it saw the biggest shift away from what a normal market would look like."

Indeed, a recent report by the city comptroller's office found that wealthy Manhattan neighborhood saw the most residents flee the city during the pandemic, based on an analysis of change-of-address requests filed with the U.S. Postal Service. The Upper East Side had one of the biggest exoduses, losing about 21,400 residents compared to 2019.

Related coverage:

• Upper East Side Rents Stop Dropping, Finally: Study
• Upper East Side Rents Plummeted In 2020, Study Finds