Lower Manhattan’s Early November Rental Activity Down 70% Y-O-Y

Posted by Jonathan Miller - Thursday, November 29, 2012, 12:40 PM

I took a look at closed rental activity for the first part of November, two days after Sandy left us to observe it’s impact of rental activity in Lower Manhattan. For these purposes, I defined this area as the 4 zip codes of 10280, 10004, 10005, 10006 when trying to show a before and after metric. I could have gone later in the month (ie today) but I wanted to have a good week of data to fall in after the expiration of the period analyzed so the year-over-year was more comparable.

There were 199 closed rentals in this period in 2011 compared to 60 closed rentals in 2012, a 69.8% drop in rental activity. However, the decline is due to buildings being off line and there being initial access issues, not lack of demand. With 40 something commercial and rental buildings off line in a more broadly defined Lower Manhattan, inventory remains tight and it is hard to see much in the way of a reprieve in rental price levels as a result of the storm.

The mapping software I have isn’t able to reflect multiple apartment rentals in a building. Still, you can see fewer locations represented in 2012.

November 1-21, 2012

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November 1-21, 2011

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