Manhattan Rents 2002 to January 2010

I have been keeping tabs on the Manhattan rental market with the help of data culled from Citi-Habitats's market reports. I excluded the 3+ bedroom series because most of the volume is in the smaller sizes and the graph is just easier to read without it.

Some notes about the data:

1. It doesn't include the effect of incentives unless they are factored in the base rent. Adding this effect in would add an additional decline when those incentives started appearing en masse.

2. The data comes from actual rented apartments. This is why data from CH is vastly preferable to data from TREGNY, which (inexplicably) uses asking prices.

3. The series was annual from 2002-2006, has data for Q3 and Q4 2007 (none for Q1 and Q2), and monthly thereafter.

4. The data that goes into this average changed slightly between 2006 and 2007. The LES, Harlem, Washington Heights, and Morningside Heights were added into the index. This might account for the decreases between 2006 and 2007. I will post some neighborhood-specific graphs (they are much more volatile) later on, which won't have this issue.

My read is that we are around 2003 prices.

Average 2002 Jan2010