The first “apartment” I lived in when I moved to NYC in 2004 was not so much an apartment as a dorm room in the little-known—and highly underrated—neighborhood called Morningside Heights.  This area is most notably home to Columbia University.  In ambiance and identity, it is what the Upper West Side aspires to be—liberal, intellectual, conspicuously unfashionable, beautifully residential.  It became the place I called home for the better part of 7 years of my nomadic apartment-hopping NYC life.

As an apartment-seeker, there are several key things to note about Morningside Heights.

Firstly and arguably most importantly, location—where exactly is it?  The natural boundaries are 110th Street to the south, 120th Street to the north, Morningside Park to the east, and Riverside Park and the Hudson River to the west.  However, I think it’s fair to say that it extends as far south as 96th Street and as far north as 125th Street.  The main subway line is the 1, with local stops at 103rd, 110th, 116th, and 125th Streets, connecting to the 2/3 express trains at 96th Street.  Commute time to midtown is 20-30 minutes.

This leads to the second question—it’s pretty far north…is it safe?  Yes!  I am a small, single Asian chick.  If it’s safe for me, it’s safe for you.

Thirdly, a more general question—what’s the neighborhood like?  Eminently livable, arguably serene.  Morningside Heights offers a high standard of living at a discount.  It is perfect for families, young professionals, and unemployed homebodies (if you can swing the rent, more power to you).  You should consider it if you want all the conveniences of city life away from the hustle-and-bustle and rampant commercialism that accompanies it.

Restaurants and stores are concentrated on the main drag, Broadway, south of the main gates to Columbia University’s campus on 116th Street.  They include the iconic Tom’s Diner from Seinfeld and dining options that range from French to Korean to take-out falafel.  There are plenty of gorgeous pre-war buildings around Broadway and low-rise walkups on side streets. Elegant pre-war (mostly) doormen buildings line Riverside Drive one block to the west.  On Riverside, you can take in the majestic views of the Hudson and the George Washington Bridge, enter the park below, and access the Greenway for a stroll or bike ride along the western contour of Manhattan.  East of Broadway is Amsterdam Ave, which is a bit colder in architecture and devoid of the greenery characterizing Riverside but more affordable.  One standout landmark is the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine.  The adjoining garden has free-roaming peacocks.  It’s disorienting and magical.

It’s not for everyone.  If you like the meatpacking district, and you’re not foreign, it’s likely not a good match.  If you can’t handle occasionally sharing the sidewalk with some punk underage drunk kids swaying up Broadway after a night of carousing, you might be happier elsewhere.

These punk kids, along with faculty, occupy most of the neighborhood and define its university culture.  Yes, there is an American Apparel, a Chipotle, and the requisite delicious pizza place that serves up cheap jumbo-sized slices (Koronet’s Pizza).  On the flipside, this culture breeds unique gems: (1) Labyrinth Books (renamed in recent years to Book Culture, a silly name I refuse to recognize) is the best, most esoteric, and outrageously pretentious bookstore in the city, (2) the Hungarian Pastry Shop, where lingering for an entire day refilling the same mug of coffee is considered a generally accepted practice.  Some people study or read, others are working on their magnum opus.  These institutions would not thrive elsewhere in the city.  Lastly, I feel obligated to mention that the best bagels in NYC can be found at Absolut Bagels on 108th and Broadway.

I originally moved to Morningside Heights because I had no other option.  Literally.  Columbia required all freshmen to live in dorms.  And looking back, I’m glad I did.  I will continue to bounce around and inhabit other NYC neighborhoods, but Morningside Heights will always be a place I consider home in some way.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be putting out our own string of neighborhood profiles for our renters. We’re starting off with Battery Park City - located near the southern tip of Manhattan. There, renters can find a number of no-fee luxury high-rises with a wonderful view of the surrounding rivers. Without further ado, we present…

Battery Park City Spotlight

If you’re thinking about moving to Battery Park City, keep that thought. You are on the right track. Bordered by Chambers Street and Battery Place in the North and South, and West Street and the Hudson River in the East and West, Battery Park City will charm you into moving there.

The neighborhood has the prestige of being the “newest” neighborhood in the city. Conceived in the 60’s, construction only began in the early 80’s. Since then, though, there has been a steady stream of renters. In fact, the 2010 census rang in at a tad over 13,000 residents.

Harbor at Battery Park City

Battery Park City’s name is derived from the 25-acre park that lies south of it (Battery Park), and it was built on landfill that was excavated from the World Trade Center and other construction sites around the city. Surprisingly, 9/11 had only a small impact on the neighborhood. Despite renters being understandably spooked in its aftermath, the neighborhood bounced back pretty quickly and is now as strong as ever.

When walking through the quiet streets of Battery Park City, you can’t help but feel the suburban atmosphere. With the park as its backyard and the Hudson River and the ever-growing Jersey City skyline as its backdrop, the neighborhood attracts newcomers looking to live in modern yet affordable buildings. The excellent bike path that runs along West Street is a great perk as well.

Most of the residential buildings that have been built in Battery Park City during the last eight years are proudly “green”. In fact, the neighborhood has the honor of developing the first residential LEED-approved building in Manhattan built on its “recycled” earth: The Solaire at 20 River Terrace (LEED is a nationally accepted rating system created by the United States Green Building Council). Other buildings  followed its lead, and the neighborhood currently touts its sustainability as a major drawing point.

There are no walk-ups or buildings older than twenty years here, so if that’s your thing – Battery Park City might not be the place for you. However, if you are interested in a neighborhood that is green, clean, hip, and whose buildings have every amenity imaginable, you’re looking in the right place.

If you’re a budding financier, you’ll be happy to note that many financial firms are located near the lower tip of Manhattan. If you happen to be working at one, Battery Park is an excellent place to start your apartment search.You’ll be able to walk to work (now how many New Yorkers can say that?) in a relatively short amount of time, and not be stressed out by the morning commute. Then you can use those extra two hours to play in other people’s neighborhoods, always knowing that a placid town awaits your return each night.

One of the most interesting discoveries we’ve made while creating and growing RentHop is that not all brokers are equal.  We originally began with the premise that the Internet was turning real estate professionals into over-priced commodities, prepped for a huge sell-off in prices, but we were wrong.  Excellent agents certainly earn their keep, compared to the zero-value or even negative-value renters receive from the mediocre masses.

As nerdy software engineers turned real estate startup founders, we love building quantitative models in an attempt to automate what is normally a very human task.  This time, however, we’re throwing you a curve ball.  We are NOT trying to automate the real estate professional; instead, we are tackling the still difficult but more tractable problem of automatically determining which agents are likely to be good!  Inside our RentHop labs (aka an emacs buffer in the cloud), we constantly tweak our secret ranking algorithm to show you only the best apartment listings first.  While we guard the exact formulas quite closely, today we’ll shed some light on how to infer professional, helpful, and responsive behavior.

Take the two search rank summaries from two actual listings on our site today:

First, we have a listing that would normally receive an above average score ranking poorly.  The broker in this case has not yet verified all of his contactinformation with us so we are not able to display it openly to renters for direct contact.  Also, we carefully track every account’s historical behavior, so we can see that for previous listings by the same manager, many renters have attempted to make contact and did not hear back promptly (renter’s are an impatient bunch; anyone not receiving a reply within a day or two is as good as gone).  Finally, the manager has not logged in to update any price changes or availability changes for quite a few days.  In this peak season market, apartments are moving quickly!  A listing without some update for over a week is very much in danger of being stale.

In contrast, the landlord on the right side has done lots of good things.  He has received excellent feedback over his account’s history from renters, and he has fully verified all of his contact information with out listings department.  More importantly, his day-to-day interactions with renter’s has been upstanding.  He logs in on a daily basis to remove old listings and update information on any changes, and he consistently responds promptly to questions from renters and requests to schedule appointments.

There is a lot more to being a good broker than speedy blackberry reflexes or obsessively good customer service, but it’s shocking how many don’t make this basic cut.  Just know that when you are browsing NYC Apartment rentals on our site, we are doing our best to shield you from those prone to serving you lots of radio silence.

Congratulations to Guillaume Derouet for posting our one millionth New York City rental listing!

http://www.renthop.com/listings/waverly_ave/_/1000000

We actually didn’t expect to cross the mark until near the end of the month, but the renter AND landlord activity has been growing at a break-neck pace.  Keep of the good work everyone; I’m so glad the community continues to thrive and evolve.

Many of you have also noticed the recent design changes that Lawrence has implemented, both in the landlord dashboard and the main list-based apartment search.  However, one of my favorite changes has been the new and streamlined NYC apartment map search.  When we first began, three years ago, the map page was our original and only search mode!  Back in the day we plotted every listing in Manhattan on the Google map, using some clever JS hackery to keep the performance acceptable while juggling thousands of listings.  As we’ve grown, however, we realized that renters tend not to want to see every possible listing.  It’s much more important just to see the high quality, highly relevant posts.   Now, for the first time ever on RentHop, we’ve fully integrated our trust score and search rank algorithms alongside the location-based filtering.

Give it a shot!

Within the next few days, we are expecting to reach our one millionth NYC apartment listing ever posted on RentHop.com!  If you are the lucky landlord or broker to hit the big million, then let us know and we’ll gift you 1,000 free RentHop credits for posting on CraigsList, buying featured listings, or many of the our premium features in our landlord dashboard.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports today Manhattan Apartments Lure Investors Seeking Market Foothold.  Down in the rental trenches, we’ve seen a lot of building transactions as the 2008 financial crisis dislocated REIT balance sheets across the country.  One notable includes Longacre House in Midtown West, one of our original RentHop landlords.  In the middle of 2009, they transitioned from a Macklowe, famous among brokers for generous OP and free-rent incentives, to ownership under EQR, one of the largest REITs with a strong Manhattan residential presence (and sadly very few OP payments).

An interesting paragraph in the Blomberg piece stood out:

Demand for Manhattan apartment properties has pushed up prices and lowered the yield for investors. Capitalization rates on multifamily buildings in the borough averaged 5.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010, compared with 6.6 percent nationally, according to Real Capital.

The capitalization rate is the real estate equivalent of the P/E ratio in equity fundamentals, except that it is quoted as the percentage of the property purchase price earned each year in net operating income.  In simpler terms, for every $100 used to buy real estate in most of the country today, a building owner expected to earn $6.60 per year.  In Manhattan, a building only expects to return $5.10 per year, almost 23% less income for the same price!

Of course, when evaluating any investment, the cash flow yields are not the only concern.  After all, a cap rate doesn’t consider cost of financing, and when was the last time anyone bought a stock solely because of its high dividend yields? (I’m assuming value/income mutual fund managers are not RentHop blog readers)

I suspect there are a few reasons to be bullish on highrise landlording in Manhattan:

Financing rates are near an all-time low.

After almost three years of large real estate deals gone bust, banks are finally taking on a bit more risk and that includes providing attractive financing to experienced real estate investors.

Cap rates in Manhattan traditionally trade below the nation.

In 2007, cap rates for luxury highrise residential buildings are comparable to what they are now.  Keep in mind that Manhattan rental prices during the 2002-2007 boom rose at a much greater pace than the nation.  The cap rate only captures a snapshot of net-operating-income the year prior to the purchase divided by the purchase price at closing.  If the investors can rely on rents to rise at rates significantly faster than inflation, then the actual returns over a multi-year holding period can be significantly higher than the cap rate (couple that with low borrowing costs and you’ve got a recipe for a great cash-on-cash return).  Unfortunately for renters and brokers, that also means we should expect rent increases in the coming years.

Plain and simple, investors like to bet on appreciating assets.

It’s a sad truth in real estate, but quality property management and reliable tenants are not the primary concern for owners.  Most landlords know that annual cash flows and yields are simply the icing on the cake, and that the real money in real estate is flipping a property at appreciated prices, often with a healthy dose of leverage and intelligent tax planning.  Professional real estate investors obviously care about maintaining healthy income statements, but in the end the balance sheet is king.   Other than a few distressed opportunities such as Florida, Vegas, and Michigan; one of the best metro areas due for a real estate turnaround in Manhattan.  It’s definitely a gamble on a large rebound in the financial sector and Silicon Alley bidding up housing demand, but year over year rents have been quite encouraging.

As always, we do our best to follow the NYC Apartments market and watch with great interest as the Manhattan recovery continues to develop.

Best location in Forest Hills – Size Matters

Apartment 2K– Fully Renovated 1BR with private balcony * 875 SF * $1900
Our Largest One Bedroom, kitchen features granite countertops and stainless steel appliances, marble bathroom with hand carved vanity. FLOOR PLAN

Apartment 6W – Corner Two Bedroom with private balcony * 1033 SF * $2050
Gigantic Two Bedroom Apartment, corner private unit, new wood flooring throughout, large living room, abundant closet space. FLOOR PLAN

Apartment 16V – Fully Renovated 3BR with private balcony * 1327 SF * $3000
Fabulous Three Bedroom featuring kitchen with granite countertops and stainless steel appliances, two marble bathrooms with hand carved vanities, huge private balcony, and great views. FLOOR PLAN

Call us today for the latest updates of our new listings.  888-256-0135

Email me, Shari Forrest, directly with any questions HERE

We are happy to give broker preview tours.

104-20 Queens Boulevard
Close to transportation: E, F, M and R Subway Lines and LIRR
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Leasing office hours:
Monday through Thursday from 10-7
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Saturday/Sunday from 11-5

For those who do consulting work, a once counter-intuitive secret is now common knowledge:  accepting a lower hourly rate often means having a more demanding, more obnoxiously clueless, and more frustrating client.  The theory is the lower paying clients don’t know the value of high quality work, or are generally on a lower budget and need to try and squeeze the most value out of their dollar.      We don’t blame them; these clients can be good career starting points, plus we appreciate life much more once we graduate to better opportunities.  An established freelancer has plenty of clients knocking at his door, so the easy filter is sticking to a higher rate and avoiding all the charity work in the lower rungs.

For anyone wondering about hard numbers, looking for coding work contracted for less than $60 an hour in the US is the equivalent to searching for a rent controlled apartment.  It will be tough to find and will certainly be full of deficiencies, but sometimes you have no choice.  As the client, you expect and accept the problems and look forward to upgrading when your situation improves.

Real estate professionals unfortunately don’t have as direct a way to raise their consulting rates.   I know there are skeptics, but it’s true; excellent brokers do exist and there is enormous variation in skill between the great ones, the average, and the terrible.  If you’ve never met a value-adding broker, then it’s because you are the client who wants a programmer at $10 an hour.  I’ll explain shortly.

Say I’ve got 5 clients who all want me to show apartments this weekend.  Three want studios under $1800 a month, one wants a 1BR in Brooklyn, and the last one wants a 2BR in Financial District, preferring a luxury high rise.   Well that’s obvious, right?  Unless one of the clients is a solid word-of-mouth referral, I need to guess that all 5 will convert at the same rate, but as a broker I get about $1800 on the studio guys, I probably can’t convert Brooklyn because I’ve never bothered to preview there, but I’ve got a slew of OP luxury highrises in FiDi that pay $4500 on conversion.  While I’m there, I learn more and more about the other luxury high rises so I’ll be more prepared for the next set of 2BR Wall Street roommates.  By corollary, I becoming more clueless about Brooklyn and the low-end studios relative to my luxury high rise knowledge.

Brokers ensure their deals close while keeping their clients happy and informed throughout the entire transaction process.  In my experience it’s pretty obvious by closing whether the co-broker was good or sucked.  Unfortunately for the good ones, real estate commissions cap out at 6% for sales and 15% for rentals.  How do they do the equivalent of raising their rates?  Easy, they just reject clients who seek lower priced transactions.

Hilariously, the public actually thinks the opposite.  “Why should a Realtor get $60K selling a $1M house for doing the same exact work as a Realtor who gets $12K selling a $200K house?”  Well, the answer is they are clearly two very different Realtors.  One is a veteran consultant charging $500 an hour, and the other is an entry-level player building credibility at $100 an hour.

Most landlords decide to add incentives to reduce their vacancy rates as we head into the Winter season.  After all, most rational people try to avoid moving in the cold  weather, around holiday season.   Even many brokers decide to stop working or reduce their hours once the peak March to October rental season ends.   Still, for those who have no choice but to do a Winter relocation (or the clever ones who try to stay off peak cycle), there are usually plenty of deals to go around!

Unfortunately, New York City real estate is in a strange situation right now, where landlords are cautiously optimistic that the local economy is rebounding and the sudden lack of spending propensity in the past two years is finally reversing course.  What we’re seeing is that higher end, modern luxury buildings are piling on the incentives, as evidenced by the previous post regarding 505 West 37th.  At the more competitively priced end of the spectrum, we are actually seeing cutbacks, despite being in roughly the same neighborhood.  The Vogue at 990 Avenue of the Americas reduced OPs earlier this year, and just today, Herald Towers sent this OP reduction to their brokerage network.

Stay tuned as we move deeper into the off-peak season.  As always, we try our best to stay up-to-date on the latest New York Apartment deals and incentives around the city.

Wow, I saw this while glancing through my inbox yesterday.  505 West 37th is offering 2 months free + 2 months OP!!  That’s 4/14 months of discount off the gross from the landlord’s point of view!

There are a few interesting ways to play this deal.  If you are a broker, do you try advertising the open listings with 3 months free as a net effective, hoping to fold half your OP into the rent during the negotiation process?

If you are a renter, do you walk into the leasing office demanding 3 months free?  Better yet, can you find a licensed broker to be your roommate, and then you all get the full 4 months free??  Note that not all buildings by this management company are offering such a great deal.  I believe 2 Gold is still at 1 month free + 1 month OP.  Still, after gathering data from the past three years, we’re pretty sure November is the magic sweet spot for moving, if you can somehow sync your schedule accordingly.