During the second quarter, real estate agents and landlords uploaded 54 times more walkthrough videos, and 10 times more floorplans, on rental listings than they did in the first quarter. Landlords, meanwhile, responded to the stay-at-home restrictions with a surge in virtual tour offerings. This data suggests that in addition to renters with expiring leases who were looking to move, many were watching curiously to see how the pandemic might impact New York City’s historically high rents. Even searches for Manhattan rentals increased at 15% year over year. Stay-at-home-orders drove a flood of interest in online resources and home shopping, and StreetEasy searches for rentals in all three boroughs analyzed increased over last year.īrooklyn saw the biggest jump in user interest, with 26% more searches than 2019, while Queens searches rose 24%. Yet while demand for new rentals fell, interest in those same apartments - as measured by anonymized StreetEasy user search data - rose over last year, especially in the outer boroughs. The same drop in demand also caused the StreetEasy Manhattan Rent Index ii to fall year-over-year for the first time since the Great Recession, sinking 0.9% to $3,236. Landlords cut a record 6.7% off the median asking rent in the borough, equivalent to $221 per month for the median apartment.
The period saw a record high for rental discounts in Manhattan: 34.7 percent of all borough rentals received a discount.