West Village Home Sale Prices Are Up 141 Percent From Last Year

WEST VILLAGE, NY — Finding a place to live in the West Village 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.)

In the West Village, the median home sale price in October was $2,862,25o — an eyecatching 141 percent increase from the same month last year, and a jump of over $1.2 million.

Every housing cost metric in the West Village tracked by the StreetEasy study was on the rise in October.

The median asking price for the month was $1,872,500, which is up 25 percent from the same time last year. While the median asking rent in October was $4,495, a 40 percent jump from last October.

Overall, in Downtown Manhattan, rents hit a record-high $4,300 in October.

In terms of looking from month to month in 2021, the lone West Village home price statistic to go down from September to October of this year was the asking price going from $1,995,000 to $1,872,500. The median asking rent and recorded home sale prices both went up from September to October.

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.

Indeed, a recent report by the city comptroller's office found that wealthy Manhattan neighborhoods 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.

Patch reporter Nick Garber contributed to this report.