Show HN: An interactive dashboard to explore NYC rentals data

Show HN: An interactive dashboard to explore NYC rentals data(leaseswap.nyc)

70 points by giulioco 304 days ago | 51 comments

historically, rentals in NYC have been pretty wild. the median 1BR in West Village as of July 2025 cost $5,750/month. about a month ago, NYC passed a law to ban broker fees which many predicted would have increased rents. I realized I had access to some original data from a previous project so I built a dashboard to help me visualize the changes and see for myself.

you can filter by neighborhoods, bedrooms, original source where the rentals were posted, and select a timeframe.

this is still a work in progress, so apologies in advance for any issues you encounter. I would love any feedback on how to improve it and/or what other visualizations i should add. known issues include:

- some neighborhoods like Prospect Park will also automatically select other, unrelated, neighborhoods when selected

- sometimes even when you filter by 1BR it will also include some 2BR

- some units might have been listed on multiple platforms, effectively counting as duplicates

rprend 301 days ago |

I think it’s important to note that this is asking rent, not what people are paying on average. Landlords do tricks to make rental history appear more expensive than it was, and every online posting should be read as aspirational price, not a real one. Listing inflation helps increase price expectations for the future, and has helped drive the crazy rent inflation NYC has seen post covid (exceeding other expensive metros like SF).

For example- my current apartment had a crazy high lease concession. The paper rent is 30% higher than what I pay. The only inconvenience is that i had to pay a security deposit at the paper rent, not actual rent. It’s like a software business giving 2 months free then multiplying MRR by 12, not taking churn into account. I am moving out after a year.

colechristensen 301 days ago | |

I wish lease concessions were also illegal. They've always come with extra gotchas to get them which wouldn't be included in a normal lease, and like you say, encourage this false history.

underlipton 301 days ago | |

This is a widespread issue and one of the sources of the major dislocation between theory (supply-and-demand) and practice (rents effectively never drop, on paper). It needs to be outlawed. If you have to lower your rate, you (should) have to actually lower your rate. The rent is (should be) what tenants pay, full stop.

msgodel 301 days ago | | |

I'm sure the people underwriting the loans will catch on as long as we're not dumb enough to bail them out a second time.

Eawrig05 301 days ago | |

Realtors pull a similar trick: instead of dropping the price on Zillow (which flags it), they delist and relist at a lower price. Zillow treats it like a new listing, so the price history looks clean. Totally skews market transparency.

_dark_matter_ 301 days ago | | |

I follow our local market very closely because we're considering moving and have never seen this. I've even seen houses delisted and relisted, and the full pricing history remains on Zillow. Can you share an example?

guessmyname 301 days ago | | |

Zillow probably has an incentive to not fix this “bug”, because they could easily track prices based on the address.

jeffbee 302 days ago |

Excellent presentation. NY and every other city should have a lease registry so you don't have to guess from advertisements.

cuuupid 302 days ago |

The average 2br rent for the last 2 years was $4,536

The average for the last month is is $5,738

This is a 25%+ increase, let's say around 10% of that can be accounted for via seasonal increases.

The almost certain incoming mayor has pushed for rent stabilization/control/freeze. Let's assume this restricts increases to 10% Y/Y similar to cities like Seattle, this would cause at least a 5% recessionary pressure for housing suppliers.

The big question - is the increase due to greed among the supply (i.e. this pressure is good for the market), due to existing market pressures (i.e. this pressure may cause a wider recession in the housing market), or due to a bubble (i.e. this pressure may pop it, for better or worse)?

screye 301 days ago | |

Some of it has to do with the FARE bill making broker fees illegal. That should account for a 5% of the increase.

NYC has negligible vacancy rates and airbnbs are already illegal. Sounds like a supply problem. The supply problem gets clearer when you realize how quickly the jersey side has grown. It's because NYC has no supply.

I have no proof for this, but lots of influencer types, nepo babies and people with remote jobs moved to NY during covid and didn't leave. NY Metro population never saw a covid dip, has been steadily growing and RTO mandates are probably causing suburbanites to consider moving back into the city. We are seeing price increases from a repressed real estate market that's finally making bank from the supply crunch.

Compare NYC metro area to SF metro area. NYC saw smaller covid drop, larger subsequent pct growth and a much much larger absolute growth rate. Rent control won't fix anything. They need to start approving market-rate housing at a mad rate. Austin is a great reference.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/23083/new-...

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/cities/23130/san-...

harmmonica 301 days ago | | |

Just to piggyback some info onto the FARE Act that the NYC City Council passed because I think it's interesting when talking about the second-order effects of some regulations.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this Act, NYC has been an outlier in the US where the tenant would pay a broker fee to rent apartments that were listed by a broker. The odd thing about it has been that it's not the tenant who would historically "hire" the broker, but instead the landlord/owner. And the benefit to the landlord/owner is obvious: they didn't need to expend any resources/energy to market the property for lease and then once a tenant was found the tenant would take care of paying for the broker's efforts through a fee that would range from, say, 8% up to 15% or more of the annual lease rate (e.g., $3000 per month apartment minimum fee would be $3k and sometimes a multiple of that if the broker could get away with it). With the FARE Act this practice where the landlord hired the broker and the tenant pays the fee was banned. You may see where this is going...

For some reason, the NYC City Council thought (and still does think because you can't admit a potential mistake) that the landlord was going to now eat the broker's fee without raising the rent to offset that additional cost. So far? Landlords are not eating the fee and instead are raising the rents. And the worst of it is that the broker fee was always a one-time fee meaning that if the tenant stayed in place they wouldn't be paying the fee again upon lease renewal. Now? The tenant is paying the increased rent to offset the landlord having to pay the fee and that is now the baseline of all future rent increases.

Still early days for the FARE Act, but any reasonable person would've understood that landlords would not eat the broker fee and that this would cause an overnight increase in rents, which... it did (literally overnight once the Act was in effect).

hshdhdhj4444 302 days ago | |

Certain units in NYC (about 1mm) are always rent stabilized. They’re rent stabilized because that was the agreement the developer made when getting permissions to build the apartments or more likely because they took advantage of tax abatements and benefits that required a certain percentage of rent stabilized apartments.

Mamdani’s stated policy is to set the y/y increase in rent for already stabilized apartments to 0% as opposed to the 3% average over the past 4 years. And in recent interviews he also has clarified he’s only promising it for the first year to counteract historically high rent increases over the past few years and subsequent years will be addressed like they always are, based on an analysis of the rental market.

Btw, the rent freeze was done at least 3 times in the 2010s with a 0% increase y/y, so this is not even new policy.

jeffbee 302 days ago | | |

For most Mamdani policies you can find a closely corresponding Bloomberg policy. The man is not a Molotov-throwing revolutionary.

Eawrig05 301 days ago | | |

That’s all fair context, but rent stabilization as a policy goal has real trade-offs. Freezing rents might offer short-term relief, but long term it disincentivizes new construction.

personjerry 301 days ago | |

> let's say around 10% of that can be accounted for via seasonal increases.

Summer inflation is much more than that

codingwagie 301 days ago | |

theres alot of wealthy people in NYC and its only increasing. in neighborhoods like west village or soho, the majority of people are not working corporate jobs. they are paying 7.5-20k a month in rent out of their pockets.

adi_hn07 301 days ago |

Do you have API access to the listing platforms or do you use web scraping? Really nice dashboard UI. One bug I noticed, on signing up with google I land on the sign up page again, instead of being redirected to the analytics dashboard.

Awesome web app overall, would love to have leaseswap on https://superlaun.ch !!

mbStavola 302 days ago |

Amusingly, selecting Bay Ridge in Brooklyn also seems to select Westerleigh in Staten Island; I know Bay Ridge shares a congressional district with Staten Island, but I assure you we're still a part of Brooklyn.

solumos 301 days ago |

Something seems off with this data. Specifically, DUMBO-Vinegar Hill—Downtown Brooklyn—Boerum Hill has a median rent of $2600, which seems very suspicious.

Also, there's no data for Crown Heights North.

oltmang 301 days ago | |

The neighborhood map seems a little busted. Selecting Fort Greene searches for Elmhurst for some reason. Also, most of Williamsburg is labelled "North Side-South Side" and selecting it searches for Kew Gardens Hills.

msukkarieh 302 days ago |

I've never lived in NYC - are median studio apts in West Village really $6k? Website looks awesome but I'm hoping that the data isn't true

asdev 301 days ago |

you should use multimodal AI to filter out apartments that are below minimum living standards(fake 1 beds, heinous layouts, apartments with 0 light etc) which there are a lot of. I think prices would be more accurate that way.

kevin11111 301 days ago |

Woah this looks really cool!

AvAn12 301 days ago |

This was on The NY Times website's real estate section for many years.

suncemoje 302 days ago |

Lovable?

cyberax 301 days ago |

So NYC needs more density to lower down housing costs, right? Right?

Just build more. Sure.