What percentage of NYC apartments have doormen?

I think your guess may be somewhat high if you are only thinking of larger (60+ apartment) buildings south of 96th street. However if you are talking about all of the apartments on Manhattan Island your guess is like a campaigning politician's estimate of economic growth. Townhouses and small buildings which abound in virtually every neighborhood (except maybe Fidi and BPC) do not have doormen, many of the loft buildings in Soho, despite their stratospheric cost, are also doormen free. Not even every large building on the UES or UWS has a doorman. North of 96th on the East Side and 125th on the West Side, doormen are a rarity. Large government subsidized complexes, both low income and Mitchell Lama (middle class) have security guards (as do some new private condos) but they do not qualify as doormen in my mind.

My guess would be large buildings south of 96th Street: 40%
All Manhattan apartments: 10%

But its an interesting question. And my guesses are just that.

You can look at the current listings as a rough approximation. StreetEasy has 7,716 listings in Manhattan right now, and 5,652 of them include a doorman in the the listing, for a whopping 73%.

Of course, that's not the same as saying that 73% of buildings have a doorman.

Thanks for the input!

My guess was based on listings I'd been looking at on SE over the past few months, so I'm pretty chuffed that my estimate is so close to the actual ratio -- listing-wise, at least.

I wonder if there's less turnover in non-doorman buildings, particularly smaller ones where the owner occupies one of the units. Or maybe non-doorman units don't draw attention to that fact when advertising themselves, so you don't notice as much in comparison to buildings that have them.

Non-doorman buildings probably don't list as often on the Internet. Not individual units, at least.

And DARE I SAY IT...gasp Jim Jones will get a huge hard on...but I bet a lot of smaller buildings are shown by broker only.

Plus there are 505,000 people living in HUD housing, which does not list on SE. And maybe 100k more in other low/moderate/middle income special housing that only rent by lottery.

So I'd discount it by 20% to 55-60% to be safe.

% of listings is vastly going to overstate % of BUILDINGS with doormen, because doormen buildings tend to be bigger.

FreebirdNYC - duh, yes of course. I was thinking number of units, but you are correct.