Search for 1 BR on UWS--What I'm seeing so far

I'm glad you made this post. I have just been browsing the site at apartments, etc. yet to get a feel for what the market is like and what we could expect to get for our money. We have the exact same budget of less than $3200 for an UWS 1 bedroom and will be moving in September. Just browsing this site the pricing seems so random for me. I couldn't figure out what I was missing and why the $2500 1 bedroom looks so much better than the $3200 1 bedroom.

Be interested to hear what you find.

Maybe the landlords trying to rent for $2,5k have higher carrying costs and/or less of a cushion hence less ability to stand a vacancy?

Anyway, as a renter, part of the cost is having to move to another place if the landlord doesn't want to renew after the lease expires. a RS will prevent that, giving you the choice to renew or not. if your household income is (i think) $175k/year or less i'd try to find one of those if i were you (not a sublet of a RS).

are we talking doorman buildings, walk ups, or both

All non-doorman so far.

i find it pretty hard to believe that you havent really found anything yet in that price range, if looking non-doorman, that is.

i also dont say this simply b/c you put the # out there, but i did feel the same way when i was looking about a year ago, but saw a drastic change when i saw apartments in the $3200-3400 range

Sorry, I'm not saying I haven't seen anything I don't like--there's lots of nice stuff! What I was saying is that the pricing has seemed much more random than it did the last time around.

i hear what you're saying, thats why i added the second part

have you thought about looking in the 3200-3400 range and putting in a 3k-3100 bid?
i'm not guaranteeing that you will see a difference, but that was about the price point where i saw marked differences

Recommend this building (doorman, classic prewar, Rudin management) -- 2 apts. currently available: http://www.urbansherpany.com/BuildingHome/1616/115_West_86th_Street

P.S. No fee on those.

Laura, that's just the insanity of the NYC market. Most other places, the spread on a place at a given quality might be 20% between the cheapest option for the same thing to the most expensive. In NYC, it's like 60%. I don't know why, perhaps it's a function of low vacancy rates. But I agree, it's just wacky. Get used to it, and see lots of places.

to laurahazardowen:

You are absolutely right. I found exactly the same thing when I was hunting last fall.

The lack of correlation between price and quality was insane! I would literally see two apartments just within a block of each other, listed at the same price, and one would be a pit, and the other would be sorta reasonable quality. A couple of times, I even saw a cheaper doorman unit pretty close to a smaller, more expensive non-doorman unit.

It made me crazy.

At the time, I chalked it up to "some landlords haven't gotten the memo." A poster above mentioned different landlords' carrying costs, and I hadn't thought of it that way but that's a good piece of the puzzle, I think.

I saw a number of units in buildings where I got the sense the landlords had owned the buildings forever, probably were making good profit on their units even back in the early 2000s' (before the 50%+ run-up in rents during the boom), and who barely pay enough attention to their units that they even bother to carefully research asking prices. And vacancies probably don't hurt them much financially, if they've owned the properties a long time (no big mortgage, etc.).

So the unit lingers, overprice, for a month, or two, or more ... and EVENTUALLY they get around to reducing the price. (Or equally likely, they DID reduce the listing price, just not enough.) But it takes a different amount of time for each different landlord to get realistic about the price.

And in between, while they're not really paying attention, and their units are mispriced -- it's pricing chaos for the renter who's in the market. I mean, there's always some stuff that's priced high because of certain amenities that you can't appreciate at first glance (for example, I lived in a building with laundry on every floor, and I had no idea that was the case until I saw the place in person), or because the landlord is hoping to snare someone who's not price-sensitive, or whatever. But the inconsistency these days is just off the charts.

(Oh, and I forgot to add, if the landlords aren't all that attentive to price, they may make nutsy assumptions based off of what they rented it for a year ago. Which just means that they've totally misread what's happened in the intevening year.)

I disagree, anotherguy: this is not just a recent phenomenon. Do you actually think it was better like 5 years ago?

> A poster above mentioned different landlords' carrying costs, and I hadn't thought of it that way but that's a good piece of the puzzle, I think.

It was me, but from a gut feeling only and from how my family behaves when renting their own properties (they are not super pros to say the least). 30yrs know for sure how this works. What i hear all the time from owners that have to rent is that "they only want/need to cover their carrying costs" but at the same time these are the guys that seem to show the least tolerance towards vacancies (guys that bought during the bubble at high costs that also disregarded high maintenance costs).

The assumption that all carrying costs can be passed onto the renters is a rich one! I guess comes from the complacency that ultra low vacancies for a decade bring. It is still included in most articles I read about renting vs buying.