11 ms·

Show HN: An interactive dashboard to explore NYC rentals data

70 points by giulioco 1y ago

historically, rentals in NYC have been pretty wild. the median 1BR in West Village as of July 2025 cost $5,750/month. about a month ago, NYC passed a law to ban broker fees which many predicted would have increased rents. I realized I had access to some original data from a previous project so I built a dashboard to help me visualize the changes and see for myself. you can filter by neighborhoods, bedrooms, original source where the rentals were posted, and select a timeframe. this is still a work in progress, so apologies in advance for any issues you encounter. I would love any feedback on how to improve it and/or what other visualizations i should add. known issues include: - some neighborhoods like Prospect Park will also automatically select other, unrelated, neighborhoods when selected - sometimes even when you filter by 1BR it will also include some 2BR - some units might have been listed on multiple platforms, effectively counting as duplicates

jeffbee 1y ago
Excellent presentation. NY and every other city should have a lease registry so you don't have to guess from advertisements.
cuuupid 1y ago
The average 2br rent for the last 2 years was $4,536 The average for the last month is is $5,738 This is a 25%+ increase, let's say around 10% of that can be accounted for via seasonal increases. The almost certain incoming mayor has pushed for rent stabilization/control/freeze. Let's assume this restricts increases to 10% Y/Y similar to cities like Seattle, this would cause at least a 5% recessionary pressure for housing suppliers. The big question - is the increase due to greed among the supply (i.e. this pressure is good for the market), due to existing market pressures (i.e. this pressure may cause a wider recession in the housing market), or due to a bubble (i.e. this pressure may pop it, for better or worse)?
- hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
  Certain units in NYC (about 1mm) are always rent stabilized. They’re rent stabilized because that was the agreement the developer made when getting permissions to build the apartments or more likely because they took advantage of tax abatements and benefits that required a certain percentage of rent stabilized apartments. Mamdani’s stated policy is to set the y/y increase in rent for already stabilized apartments to 0% as opposed to the 3% average over the past 4 years. And in recent interviews he also has clarified he’s only promising it for the first year to counteract historically high rent increases over the past few years and subsequent years will be addressed like they always are, based on an analysis of the rental market. Btw, the rent freeze was done at least 3 times in the 2010s with a 0% increase y/y, so this is not even new policy.
  - jeffbee 1y ago
    For most Mamdani policies you can find a closely corresponding Bloomberg policy. The man is not a Molotov-throwing revolutionary.
    - underlipton 1y ago
      You still have to explain the elite freakout, if he's just Bloomberg Lite. His tone is important. He's getting people used to the idea that they can ask for these things, and that politicians can run on them without obfuscating, for fear of the always-anti-socialist crowd. He's shifting the Overton window.
      - rangestransform 1y ago
        Trumpian campaign tactics perhaps, campaigning on populist rhetoric while the actual policies leave a lot of populism to be desired. Can’t say it isn’t effective
    - screye 1y ago
      The issue is their track record. No one believes election campaign promises. Bloomberg is a centi-billionaire with a track record of loving the free market. His mayoral terms were known for fiscal discipline (vs social welfare spending), hard-on-crime stances (vs. abolish police) and a strong focus on data driven outcomes (vs. intent). Mamdani is a member of the DSA, which has a track record of being anti-business (Amazon HQ2), pro-regulation (making housing expensive) and pro-union (IMO, NYC unions are a cartel keeping housing & transit more expensive than they need to be). On paper, they might endorse similar policies, but politicians are judged by their track record and immediate association.
  - Eawrig05 1y ago
    That’s all fair context, but rent stabilization as a policy goal has real trade-offs. Freezing rents might offer short-term relief, but long term it disincentivizes new construction.
- personjerry 1y ago
  > let's say around 10% of that can be accounted for via seasonal increases. Summer inflation is much more than that
- screye 1y ago
  Some of it has to do with the FARE bill making broker fees illegal. That should account for a 5% of the increase. NYC has negligible vacancy rates and airbnbs are already illegal. Sounds like a supply problem. The supply problem gets clearer when you realize how quickly the jersey side has grown. It's because NYC has no supply. I have no proof for this, but lots of influencer types, nepo babies and people with remote jobs moved to NY during covid and didn't leave. NY Metro population never saw a covid dip, has been steadily growing and RTO mandates are probably causing suburbanites to consider moving back into the city. We are seeing price increases from a repressed real estate market that's finally making bank from the supply crunch. Compare NYC metro area to SF metro area. NYC saw smaller covid drop, larger subsequent pct growth and a much much larger absolute growth rate. Rent control won't fix anything. They need to start approving market-rate housing at a mad rate. Austin is a great reference. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/23083/new-york-city/population https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/23083/new-... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/23130/san-francisco/population https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/23130/san-...
  - harmmonica 1y ago
    Just to piggyback some info onto the FARE Act that the NYC City Council passed because I think it's interesting when talking about the second-order effects of some regulations. For those of you who aren't familiar with this Act, NYC has been an outlier in the US where the tenant would pay a broker fee to rent apartments that were listed by a broker. The odd thing about it has been that it's not the tenant who would historically "hire" the broker, but instead the landlord/owner. And the benefit to the landlord/owner is obvious: they didn't need to expend any resources/energy to market the property for lease and then once a tenant was found the tenant would take care of paying for the broker's efforts through a fee that would range from, say, 8% up to 15% or more of the annual lease rate (e.g., $3000 per month apartment minimum fee would be $3k and sometimes a multiple of that if the broker could get away with it). With the FARE Act this practice where the landlord hired the broker and the tenant pays the fee was banned. You may see where this is going... For some reason, the NYC City Council thought (and still does think because you can't admit a potential mistake) that the landlord was going to now eat the broker's fee without raising the rent to offset that additional cost. So far? Landlords are not eating the fee and instead are raising the rents. And the worst of it is that the broker fee was always a one-time fee meaning that if the tenant stayed in place they wouldn't be paying the fee again upon lease renewal. Now? The tenant is paying the increased rent to offset the landlord having to pay the fee and that is now the baseline of all future rent increases. Still early days for the FARE Act, but any reasonable person would've understood that landlords would not eat the broker fee and that this would cause an overnight increase in rents, which... it did (literally overnight once the Act was in effect).
- codingwagie 1y ago
  theres alot of wealthy people in NYC and its only increasing. in neighborhoods like west village or soho, the majority of people are not working corporate jobs. they are paying 7.5-20k a month in rent out of their pockets.
msukkarieh 1y ago
I've never lived in NYC - are median studio apts in West Village really $6k? Website looks awesome but I'm hoping that the data isn't true
- jeffbee 1y ago
  That is completely true, unfortunately. There are a lot of people in NY. All the demand components — longevity/natural increase, wages, net migration — are increasing and the supply is in stasis, so the price has to rise. Under these conditions you should expect surprisingly non-linear behavior of the market price.
- VWWHFSfQ 1y ago
  Housing in Greenwich Village (the broader area including the West Village) has become outrageous in recent decades. A significant reason, but not the only reason, is because the main NYU campus is located in the middle of the small area and doesn't provide nearly enough housing (only ~20%) for the on-campus enrollment. NYU's on-campus enrollment is also roughly 50% foreign students. I don't have any data about it, but just from experience I've suspected that foreign students are willing and able to pay higher prices for housing.
- chimeracoder 1y ago
  > I've never lived in NYC - are median studio apts in West Village really $6k? Website looks awesome but I'm hoping that the data isn't true The West Village is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the country. In around 2010, it was the most expensive zip code in the country. That's due to a combination of: old buildings, very little new construction, extremely gentrified neighborhood, and NYU eating up all of the real estate in the neighborhood. That said, the map is slightly mislabeled: what's labeled as the West Village is actually Greenwich Village, and the West Village is a subset of that. This map labels places as far east as Astor Place as the West Village, which is not correct.
  - harmmonica 1y ago
    Saw this too and to reinforce your point about the West Village the conflation of Greenwich with West is actually decreasing the actual severity of the rents in the West Village (since Greenwich Village, on average, is cheaper). Not sure where creator is getting their neighborhood data from, but if you're reading this a) great job and b) if you can find a more accurate neighborhood source the utility and credibility of what you've created will go up (that's not a knock, but if New Yorkers love one thing it's knowing their city and so as soon as they see data/info that doesn't match the reality on the ground they might bail before giving this a chance).
mbStavola 1y ago
Amusingly, selecting Bay Ridge in Brooklyn also seems to select Westerleigh in Staten Island; I know Bay Ridge shares a congressional district with Staten Island, but I assure you we're still a part of Brooklyn.
suncemoje 1y ago
Lovable?
asdev 1y ago
you should use multimodal AI to filter out apartments that are below minimum living standards(fake 1 beds, heinous layouts, apartments with 0 light etc) which there are a lot of. I think prices would be more accurate that way.
rprend 1y ago
I think it’s important to note that this is asking rent, not what people are paying on average. Landlords do tricks to make rental history appear more expensive than it was, and every online posting should be read as aspirational price, not a real one. Listing inflation helps increase price expectations for the future, and has helped drive the crazy rent inflation NYC has seen post covid (exceeding other expensive metros like SF). For example- my current apartment had a crazy high lease concession. The paper rent is 30% higher than what I pay. The only inconvenience is that i had to pay a security deposit at the paper rent, not actual rent. It’s like a software business giving 2 months free then multiplying MRR by 12, not taking churn into account. I am moving out after a year.
- colechristensen 1y ago
  I wish lease concessions were also illegal. They've always come with extra gotchas to get them which wouldn't be included in a normal lease, and like you say, encourage this false history.
- underlipton 1y ago
  This is a widespread issue and one of the sources of the major dislocation between theory (supply-and-demand) and practice (rents effectively never drop, on paper). It needs to be outlawed. If you have to lower your rate, you (should) have to actually lower your rate. The rent is (should be) what tenants pay, full stop.
  - msgodel 1y ago
    I'm sure the people underwriting the loans will catch on as long as we're not dumb enough to bail them out a second time.
- Eawrig05 1y ago
  Realtors pull a similar trick: instead of dropping the price on Zillow (which flags it), they delist and relist at a lower price. Zillow treats it like a new listing, so the price history looks clean. Totally skews market transparency.
solumos 1y ago
Something seems off with this data. Specifically, DUMBO-Vinegar Hill—Downtown Brooklyn—Boerum Hill has a median rent of $2600, which seems very suspicious. Also, there's no data for Crown Heights North.
- oltmang 1y ago
  The neighborhood map seems a little busted. Selecting Fort Greene searches for Elmhurst for some reason. Also, most of Williamsburg is labelled "North Side-South Side" and selecting it searches for Kew Gardens Hills.
AvAn12 1y ago
This was on The NY Times website's real estate section for many years.
kevin11111 1y ago
Woah this looks really cool!
cyberax 1y ago
So NYC needs more density to lower down housing costs, right? Right? Just build more. Sure.
adi_hn07 1y ago
Do you have API access to the listing platforms or do you use web scraping? Really nice dashboard UI. One bug I noticed, on signing up with google I land on the sign up page again, instead of being redirected to the analytics dashboard. Awesome web app overall, would love to have leaseswap on https://superlaun.ch https://superlaun.ch !!

70 points by giulioco 1y ago

jeffbee 1y ago

Excellent presentation. NY and every other city should have a lease registry so you don't have to guess from advertisements.

cuuupid 1y ago

The average 2br rent for the last 2 years was $4,536 The average for the last month is is $5,738 This is a 25%+ increase, let's say around 10% of that can be accounted for via seasonal increases. The almost certain incoming mayor has pushed for rent stabilization/control/freeze. Let's assume this restricts increases to 10% Y/Y similar to cities like Seattle, this would cause at least a 5% recessionary pressure for housing suppliers. The big question - is the increase due to greed among the supply (i.e. this pressure is good for the market), due to existing market pressures (i.e. this pressure may cause a wider recession in the housing market), or due to a bubble (i.e. this pressure may pop it, for better or worse)?

hshdhdhj4444 1y ago
Certain units in NYC (about 1mm) are always rent stabilized. They’re rent stabilized because that was the agreement the developer made when getting permissions to build the apartments or more likely because they took advantage of tax abatements and benefits that required a certain percentage of rent stabilized apartments. Mamdani’s stated policy is to set the y/y increase in rent for already stabilized apartments to 0% as opposed to the 3% average over the past 4 years. And in recent interviews he also has clarified he’s only promising it for the first year to counteract historically high rent increases over the past few years and subsequent years will be addressed like they always are, based on an analysis of the rental market. Btw, the rent freeze was done at least 3 times in the 2010s with a 0% increase y/y, so this is not even new policy.
- jeffbee 1y ago
  For most Mamdani policies you can find a closely corresponding Bloomberg policy. The man is not a Molotov-throwing revolutionary.
  - underlipton 1y ago
    You still have to explain the elite freakout, if he's just Bloomberg Lite. His tone is important. He's getting people used to the idea that they can ask for these things, and that politicians can run on them without obfuscating, for fear of the always-anti-socialist crowd. He's shifting the Overton window.
    - rangestransform 1y ago
      Trumpian campaign tactics perhaps, campaigning on populist rhetoric while the actual policies leave a lot of populism to be desired. Can’t say it isn’t effective
  - screye 1y ago
    The issue is their track record. No one believes election campaign promises. Bloomberg is a centi-billionaire with a track record of loving the free market. His mayoral terms were known for fiscal discipline (vs social welfare spending), hard-on-crime stances (vs. abolish police) and a strong focus on data driven outcomes (vs. intent). Mamdani is a member of the DSA, which has a track record of being anti-business (Amazon HQ2), pro-regulation (making housing expensive) and pro-union (IMO, NYC unions are a cartel keeping housing & transit more expensive than they need to be). On paper, they might endorse similar policies, but politicians are judged by their track record and immediate association.
- Eawrig05 1y ago
  That’s all fair context, but rent stabilization as a policy goal has real trade-offs. Freezing rents might offer short-term relief, but long term it disincentivizes new construction.
personjerry 1y ago
> let's say around 10% of that can be accounted for via seasonal increases. Summer inflation is much more than that
screye 1y ago
Some of it has to do with the FARE bill making broker fees illegal. That should account for a 5% of the increase. NYC has negligible vacancy rates and airbnbs are already illegal. Sounds like a supply problem. The supply problem gets clearer when you realize how quickly the jersey side has grown. It's because NYC has no supply. I have no proof for this, but lots of influencer types, nepo babies and people with remote jobs moved to NY during covid and didn't leave. NY Metro population never saw a covid dip, has been steadily growing and RTO mandates are probably causing suburbanites to consider moving back into the city. We are seeing price increases from a repressed real estate market that's finally making bank from the supply crunch. Compare NYC metro area to SF metro area. NYC saw smaller covid drop, larger subsequent pct growth and a much much larger absolute growth rate. Rent control won't fix anything. They need to start approving market-rate housing at a mad rate. Austin is a great reference. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/23083/new-york-city/population https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/23083/new-... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/23130/san-francisco/population https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/23130/san-...
- harmmonica 1y ago
  Just to piggyback some info onto the FARE Act that the NYC City Council passed because I think it's interesting when talking about the second-order effects of some regulations. For those of you who aren't familiar with this Act, NYC has been an outlier in the US where the tenant would pay a broker fee to rent apartments that were listed by a broker. The odd thing about it has been that it's not the tenant who would historically "hire" the broker, but instead the landlord/owner. And the benefit to the landlord/owner is obvious: they didn't need to expend any resources/energy to market the property for lease and then once a tenant was found the tenant would take care of paying for the broker's efforts through a fee that would range from, say, 8% up to 15% or more of the annual lease rate (e.g., $3000 per month apartment minimum fee would be $3k and sometimes a multiple of that if the broker could get away with it). With the FARE Act this practice where the landlord hired the broker and the tenant pays the fee was banned. You may see where this is going... For some reason, the NYC City Council thought (and still does think because you can't admit a potential mistake) that the landlord was going to now eat the broker's fee without raising the rent to offset that additional cost. So far? Landlords are not eating the fee and instead are raising the rents. And the worst of it is that the broker fee was always a one-time fee meaning that if the tenant stayed in place they wouldn't be paying the fee again upon lease renewal. Now? The tenant is paying the increased rent to offset the landlord having to pay the fee and that is now the baseline of all future rent increases. Still early days for the FARE Act, but any reasonable person would've understood that landlords would not eat the broker fee and that this would cause an overnight increase in rents, which... it did (literally overnight once the Act was in effect).
codingwagie 1y ago
theres alot of wealthy people in NYC and its only increasing. in neighborhoods like west village or soho, the majority of people are not working corporate jobs. they are paying 7.5-20k a month in rent out of their pockets.

msukkarieh 1y ago

I've never lived in NYC - are median studio apts in West Village really $6k? Website looks awesome but I'm hoping that the data isn't true

jeffbee 1y ago
That is completely true, unfortunately. There are a lot of people in NY. All the demand components — longevity/natural increase, wages, net migration — are increasing and the supply is in stasis, so the price has to rise. Under these conditions you should expect surprisingly non-linear behavior of the market price.
VWWHFSfQ 1y ago
Housing in Greenwich Village (the broader area including the West Village) has become outrageous in recent decades. A significant reason, but not the only reason, is because the main NYU campus is located in the middle of the small area and doesn't provide nearly enough housing (only ~20%) for the on-campus enrollment. NYU's on-campus enrollment is also roughly 50% foreign students. I don't have any data about it, but just from experience I've suspected that foreign students are willing and able to pay higher prices for housing.
chimeracoder 1y ago
> I've never lived in NYC - are median studio apts in West Village really $6k? Website looks awesome but I'm hoping that the data isn't true The West Village is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the country. In around 2010, it was the most expensive zip code in the country. That's due to a combination of: old buildings, very little new construction, extremely gentrified neighborhood, and NYU eating up all of the real estate in the neighborhood. That said, the map is slightly mislabeled: what's labeled as the West Village is actually Greenwich Village, and the West Village is a subset of that. This map labels places as far east as Astor Place as the West Village, which is not correct.
- harmmonica 1y ago
  Saw this too and to reinforce your point about the West Village the conflation of Greenwich with West is actually decreasing the actual severity of the rents in the West Village (since Greenwich Village, on average, is cheaper). Not sure where creator is getting their neighborhood data from, but if you're reading this a) great job and b) if you can find a more accurate neighborhood source the utility and credibility of what you've created will go up (that's not a knock, but if New Yorkers love one thing it's knowing their city and so as soon as they see data/info that doesn't match the reality on the ground they might bail before giving this a chance).

mbStavola 1y ago

Amusingly, selecting Bay Ridge in Brooklyn also seems to select Westerleigh in Staten Island; I know Bay Ridge shares a congressional district with Staten Island, but I assure you we're still a part of Brooklyn.

suncemoje 1y ago

Lovable?

asdev 1y ago

you should use multimodal AI to filter out apartments that are below minimum living standards(fake 1 beds, heinous layouts, apartments with 0 light etc) which there are a lot of. I think prices would be more accurate that way.

rprend 1y ago

I think it’s important to note that this is asking rent, not what people are paying on average. Landlords do tricks to make rental history appear more expensive than it was, and every online posting should be read as aspirational price, not a real one. Listing inflation helps increase price expectations for the future, and has helped drive the crazy rent inflation NYC has seen post covid (exceeding other expensive metros like SF). For example- my current apartment had a crazy high lease concession. The paper rent is 30% higher than what I pay. The only inconvenience is that i had to pay a security deposit at the paper rent, not actual rent. It’s like a software business giving 2 months free then multiplying MRR by 12, not taking churn into account. I am moving out after a year.

colechristensen 1y ago
I wish lease concessions were also illegal. They've always come with extra gotchas to get them which wouldn't be included in a normal lease, and like you say, encourage this false history.
underlipton 1y ago
This is a widespread issue and one of the sources of the major dislocation between theory (supply-and-demand) and practice (rents effectively never drop, on paper). It needs to be outlawed. If you have to lower your rate, you (should) have to actually lower your rate. The rent is (should be) what tenants pay, full stop.
- msgodel 1y ago
  I'm sure the people underwriting the loans will catch on as long as we're not dumb enough to bail them out a second time.
Eawrig05 1y ago
Realtors pull a similar trick: instead of dropping the price on Zillow (which flags it), they delist and relist at a lower price. Zillow treats it like a new listing, so the price history looks clean. Totally skews market transparency.

solumos 1y ago

Something seems off with this data. Specifically, DUMBO-Vinegar Hill—Downtown Brooklyn—Boerum Hill has a median rent of $2600, which seems very suspicious. Also, there's no data for Crown Heights North.

oltmang 1y ago
The neighborhood map seems a little busted. Selecting Fort Greene searches for Elmhurst for some reason. Also, most of Williamsburg is labelled "North Side-South Side" and selecting it searches for Kew Gardens Hills.

AvAn12 1y ago

This was on The NY Times website's real estate section for many years.

kevin11111 1y ago

Woah this looks really cool!

cyberax 1y ago

So NYC needs more density to lower down housing costs, right? Right? Just build more. Sure.

adi_hn07 1y ago

Do you have API access to the listing platforms or do you use web scraping? Really nice dashboard UI. One bug I noticed, on signing up with google I land on the sign up page again, instead of being redirected to the analytics dashboard. Awesome web app overall, would love to have leaseswap on https://superlaun.ch https://superlaun.ch !!