Despite steady growth throughout 2017, Queens rental prices finished down at the end of the year, according to a real estate site.
Median rent in the “World’s Borough” fell 1.3 percent year-over-year to $2,066 in the final quarter of 2017, StreetEasy reports. The most substantial decline in median rent was seen in northwest Queens, where rents fell 2.5 percent to $2,129.
StreetEasy attributed the decrease to a “glut of high-end homes in the area” combined with the usual market slowdown in the winter. Rent prices fell 4.3 percent in Astoria, 6.3 percent in Hunters Point and 1.3 percent in Long Island City.
Price cuts also reached an all time high, with landlords trimming asking rents on 28 percent of Queens rentals on the market. This is the highest level reached since 2010, when StreetEasy began recording. Corona saw the most rent cuts with 44 percent, followed by College Point (36 percent) and Long Island City (33 percent).
South Queens was the only area of Queens to see a lower volume of price cuts in 2017 when compared to the prior year. In 2016, 22.1 percent of rentals were discounted; in 2017, 19.4 percent.
Meanwhile, Queens re-sale prices for condo, co-op and townhouse units rose twice as fast when compared to last year, rising 6.1 percent year-over-year to $509,217. Central and northeast Queens led the way, with re-sale prices rising more than 8 percent. In fact, northeast Queens saw the highest resale growth since 2010 with a median re-sale price of $588,052.
“While a flood of new construction has been the main driver of the rental market slowdown we’ve witnessed over the last year, the fourth quarter’s rent cuts are more far-reaching than in years past,” said StreetEasy Senior Economist Grant Long. “The cooling in the market is no longer limited to new, high-end buildings in select pockets of the city — there’s a broader trend of rents topping out across all price points. The slowdown is forcing landlords across the city to cut deals, and renters now have the most negotiating leverage in years.”
The report data is aggregated from public recorded sales and listings data from real estate brokerages that provide coverage of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. The reports are compiled by the StreetEasy Research team. Median re-sale price is measured by examining condo, co-op and townhouse data.
Read the full report here.
