I was wondering if anyone here has lived in this building?

I was helping a friend on an apt hunt the other day, and while in an awesome location, the prices in this building seemed quite high - 5k for a 1 bedroom.

All of the other luxury rentals we saw (many were Archstone) had 1-bedrooms starting around 3k. Archstone had many vacancies, which I assume allude to their service, but 1 USqS had very few vacancies (well, it appeared that way), so I was wondering about people's opinion on the quality of this building.

Thanks for any responses.

Related is one of the most expensive landlords in the city. Part of their strategy.
And also as you note, low vacancies, so they don't need to offer much.
Archstone is much lower quality.

Related has a superb reputation and only the finest buildings.

Thanks for the replies. It may not be the case for this particular building, but I believe vacancies for Related may be heavily rising, as for the first time ever, I saw a commercial for them advertising rentals (the same case with many dying condos).

If the market continues down, I can't imagine the prices at this building remaining sustainable.

Also, does anyone know if this is an 80/20 rental building?

Thanks

mercuricoxide, Related buildings are all overpriced. This is a decent building, definitely better than most NYC rentals, but is not worth $5K for a 1-bedroom. Objectively speaking, Related buildings are mediocre, but because the quality of rentals in NYC are so low, they can charge that much.

And yes, it is an 80/20 building, which means that 20% of the residents are bums who make less than $40K/year and pay only about 800 for a 1-bedroom while everyone else has to spend $5K. It's NYC liberalism at work!

I lived there in a corporate apartment for about 4 months back in 2006. I can't say enough positive things about the building. It is a full service building with gym, community terrace and a great and helpful staff. Unit fixtures were good quality, but they didn't have marble baths, kitchens, etc. Only negative for us was no washer/dryer in the unit. The street noise was remarkably low, although we were on a high floor. There were no issues with the 80/20, I didn't even realize it.

Since then, we moved into a Glenwood-managed building, which I think is even higher quality than this building (marble baths/kitchen, etc). However, they just tried to raise my rent and don't want to negotiate very much. If you want more luxury look into Glenwood, but they're expensive too.

To quantum:

Yeah, I've realized that Related is very over priced. I also don't know how anyone can stomach paying 5k for a 1 bedroom when your subsidized neighbor is paying 1/5 of that.

To Goldie:

Thanks for the critique. I only asked about 80/20 for psychological reasons like the one I listed above, the people don't usually cause problems. And yes, I've heard a lot of things about Glenwood.

We only liked this building since it's a luxury rental right on the park. I would probably only consider it if the 1 bedrooms came down to 4k absolute max.

It's disgraceful that people get to live in an apartment at 1/5 the price of what the others are paying simply because they're poor and the city feels sorry for them.

I probably shouldn't have brought up the 80/20 question. Can we please try to get back on topic with opinions of the actual building?

Thanks

Thanks for the contribution aboutready

Yeah, I agree.

I know that Archstone doesn't represent the entire luxury market here, but their site here:

http://www.archstoneapartments.com/Search_Results.htm?state=NY&market=90

This has all the availabilities for their Manhattan apts, so you can at least look at the data there.

Their prices seem to have come down by $500-1000 over the past yr, but still too high in some cases.

If NYC built more high-quality rental buildings, prices would go down. You can blame the city's retarded policies for the exorbitatn rent.