Manhattan rents climbed to another record in July, with the average apartment costing $6,655 per month as New Yorkers continue to grapple with some of the highest housing costs in the United States.
The average monthly rent jumped roughly 10% from a year earlier, according to a new market report.
Gary Malin, the chief operating officer of the Corcoran Group, blamed a series of city and state housing policies for contributing to the soaring prices.
“Misguided New York City and State legislation, like ‘good cause’ eviction, the FARE Act, and the 2019 rent laws, have in large part created this perfect storm for sky-high rents,” Malin said.
“These laws have curtailed the supply of rental housing,” he continued. “This has caused demand to build up to a boiling point and pricing for available apartments to reach all-time highs. Legislators seem to care more about optics versus the actual impact of their policies. Their initiatives may be well intentioned, but there’s been severe unintended consequences, and today’s apartment seekers are literally paying the price.”
The FARE Act, which took effect in 2025, generally prohibits landlords from requiring prospective tenants to pay broker fees when the tenant did not hire the broker. Before the law, New York renters were commonly charged broker fees equivalent to roughly 10% to 15% of a year’s rent. Critics of the law warned that landlords would respond by incorporating some of those costs into monthly rents.
“There’s no free lunch,” said Kenny Lee, a senior economist at StreetEasy. “Landlords will always try to offset the additional cost by passing some of it to the renters as a higher base rent. They are not running a charity.”
The record Manhattan prices also come as Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani pushes a dramatically different approach for part of the city’s housing market.
Mamdani campaigned on freezing rents for the city’s roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments, and the Rent Guidelines Board voted 7-1 to approve a rent freeze covering one- and two-year leases. The freeze will apply to qualifying leases beginning October 1. Some argue the looming freeze is already influencing landlord behavior as property owners anticipate being unable to raise rents on stabilized units.
Mamdani served as the state Assembly sponsor of legislation that sought to impose a statewide ban on certain broker fees before becoming mayor.
Opponents of the rent freeze have warned that holding rents steady while landlords face rising operating expenses could discourage investment in rent-stabilized buildings and lead to maintenance issues.
Arpit Gupta, an associate professor of finance at NYU Stern and the sole Rent Guidelines member to vote against the freeze, called the policy “troubling.”
“Freezing [rent-stabilized buildings’] rents while their expenses remain uncapped is therefore a threat to their long-term financial viability,” Gupta said. “Residents might continue to enjoy low rents, but at the cost of being trapped in units that no longer fit their needs, and with few alternatives and steadily deteriorating conditions.”
The freeze applies only to rent-stabilized apartments, leaving tenants searching for market-rate apartments exposed to a rental market that continues to set new records.
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