When not using a broker how easy is it to negotiate?

as for your price range, you have to account for the discounts that are given on apartments. 1 month rent of a $2K apt for a 1 yr lease will lover your monthly rent to approx $1835 per month.

you can look yourself through managements or with brokers on no-fee apartments or with fee apartments where the is cheaper and the broker's fee will be paid off within 1-2 yrs of lower rent.

You can definitely negotiate rents directly with the leasing agent for a rental building and in the future when they send you a renewal lease, you can try to negotiate a lower rate if you decide to renew your lease. What we've done several times is to rent an apartment at a price for one year with an option on our part to renew the lease at the same rent for a second year. In my experience, some leasing agents are quite willing to negotiate a small reduction in monthly rents and some leasing agents are not willing to budge at all. Best of luck in your apartment search.

You really can go either way. As lobster said it's all up to the agent if they'll even negotiate or not. I recently rented in fidi and was very close renting in upper east. Upper east I negotiated myself in fidi I had a broker and he negotiated for me. I found the place and managment in upper east myself so handled it all. But downtown an agent showed me and I was able to negotiate 150 off their asking after amortizing 2 free months on a 14 month contract. And they paid my brokers full fee. From my experience you could even look at 2100 per month apartments and still come close to your budget. We did. Best of luck.

a broker doesn't help -- the higher the rent -- the more they receive...

Brokers are good for negotiating within certain reasonable bounds and in fact can help you if you don't know what those reasonable bounds are.

If you want to play hardball, a broker on your side isn't going to be a help. The real reason is that the best negotiator is prepared to walk away. And brokers are paid to help close deals, not to walk away.