It’s recovery time. In Manhattan, new lease signings rose to their highest level for the month of January, since the last financial crisis: up 57.6%year over year.

Lowered rents prompted an increase in the new lease contracts activity. Tenants are moving back to the city in search of good deals as they sense the leverage in their favor is not going to last forever.

The Median Rental Price was $3,000, down -16.6% from the previous year while the Net Effective Median Rent decreased -19% year over year to $2,812, the eighth consecutive month down and the second largest annual drop since at least 2008.

The percentage of apartments offered with some form of Concession was 46.5%, up 6.3% from the same period last year. The landlord concession rental equivalent surged year over year to set a new record of 2.3 months.

The story is similar in Brooklyn: There were 1,546 new leases signed, a nearly 46 percent increase from the previous year. The median rent was down, from $2,987 last year to $2,600 last month.

In Brooklyn, about 40 percent of all new leases came with a concession — a dip from January 2020, when 43 percent came with a perk. The average concession in the borough was 2.1 free months of rent.

The number of leases with concessions was even higher in Queens, where close to 58 percent of all new leases had some kind of perk. In the northwestern part of that borough, the median rent was $2,471, a 17 percent decrease from the same period in 2020. But the number of new leases signed also decreased, if only slightly: 294 were inked last month compared to 308 at the same time last year.

(source: therealdeal.com)