Searching for an apartment in New York City went from frustrating to downright crazy.
In a city where landlords have taken control and are driving up rents to astronomical levels, renters are fighting their hardest ever battle for housing this summer.
Take Aurielle Catron, a 29-year-old security engineer who braved the New York City jungle to find a two-bedroom apartment in Bushwick. After a month of rigorous searching and 52 viewings, Catron landed a rent-stabilized, four-story, staircase-style unit for $3,200 a month.
It wasn’t her dream apartment — there was no laundry room or elevator — but after losing a bidding war in which the $2,800 listing went up to $3,600, she was relieved to have a place to call her own.
“People are willing to say, ‘I’ll pay you $200, $500, $600 more than the asking rent if you give me this apartment,'” she said. Bloombergreporting on the battle for rental property today. “I can’t compete with that.”
But it wasn’t just losing bids. For Amber Melhouse, 49, the stakes were even higher. After being evicted from her Brooklyn apartment when her landlord raised the rent by $1,350 a month, Melhouse’s search for a smaller home turned into a horror show when the burden was too much for her after her divorce.
At one studio tour, she arrived 30 minutes early, but there were four people in line ahead of her and a crowd behind her. The spot was already filled before she even signed up. Now she’s staying with a friend, considering quitting her small pet-care business and wondering if she might have to leave New York altogether.
“I feel like this whole apartment hunting experience was a test of whether or not I should stay in New York. Like, is this a way to get me out of New York?,” Melhouse told the outlet. “My whole life is here and I don’t want to leave.”
This cutthroat rental market isn’t just a collection of horror stories. It’s the harsh reality facing thousands of New Yorkers this summer. Bidding wars, exorbitant rents, and lines of desperate apartment hunters stretching around the block are the new normal, as they have been for years.
Jonathan Miller, president of real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel, said the situation changed in favor of landlords shortly after the pandemic began.
“Landlords are back in control and they can impose increasingly favorable terms for themselves,” he said.
In fact, some of these tactics are downright dirty: Real estate agents fuel bidding wars by underpricing apartments, attracting large numbers of potential buyers to open houses, and then choosing the highest bidder or the tenant with the best financial standing.
“There are so many TikTok brokers now rushing to make a splash,” Douglas Elliman agent Kian Sanai told Bloomberg. “At the end of the day, we’re in the sales business, but 80% of the competition in the rental market is real.”
Renters are under pressure as new graduates flood the market this summer and mortgage rates soar, making home buying unthinkable.
For some, like Cornell University graduate Matthew Braganza, the search for housing has become even tougher than the job hunt.
Even though he had a steady accounting job, Braganza had to jump through a number of hurdles to stand out from the crowd, including personal recommendations, a LinkedIn profile and a cover letter. After looking at nearly 100 apartments, he gave up on living alone and now shares a Lower East Side apartment with three roommates.
“It was harder to find an apartment than it was to find a job,” Braganza said. “It felt like I was competing with a million other people.”
Real estate agents like Compass’ Thomas Hollingsworth are making the most of the desperation, by requiring college transcripts from applicants with poor rental history or limited income.
“If they’re an A student, we’re going to be more trusting that they’re going to get a job and be able to pay rent,” Hollingsworth says. “If they’re a dropout or have all Ds, we’re going to be more cautious.”
And don’t think for a second that bidding wars are completely natural: Some agents are rigged, holding back-to-back open houses or booking them just minutes apart, creating a frenzy that drives up rents even more.
Bill Kowalchuk of Coldwell Banker Warburg acknowledged that such tactics are almost guaranteed to get offers above the asking price — the kind of strategy that’s making New York’s “Wild West” market more chaotic than ever.
The rent frenzy reached new heights in June, with bidding wars erupting in Manhattan and Brooklyn, with nearly a quarter of new leases in both boroughs caught up in the frenzy.
Hollingsworth himself built a “basic” four-story, $2,000 studio on Second Avenue in mid-Manhattan, attracted 100 tenants and 20 applicants, and ultimately offered $2,075 to rent to people he was “generally comfortable” working with.
Applicants who bid just $25 higher but proved difficult to work with were eliminated, allowing landlords to escape potentially problematic tenants, Hollingsworth said.
