[the_mar]

Anecdotally, my apartment building has 0% vacancy rate. And a newer building across the street has at least 10 apartments vacant for the most of the year.

Anecdotally, i know quite a few boomers that own multiple properties (>3) in manhattan, some of which they rent some of which they keep vacant for when they want to come to the city I feel like at least some % of apartments in the city are visibly vacant most of the time because they are just part time homes for the wealthy.

[ch4s3]

The research for this does account for pied-à-terres, which do exist in some number but are a tiny fraction of he total and mainly exist in a handful of Manhattan neighborhoods. There are only about 10K of these in NYC[1] which is 0.27% of the 3,644,000 total housing units in the city. This just doesn't seem like a real problem when the rental vacancy rate is shockingly 1.4%[2] (of the 2,183,064 total rental units).

[1] https://www.brickunderground.com/buy/what-is-a-nyc-pied-a-te...

[2] https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/news/007-24/new-york-city-s-vac...

[hadlock]

I struggle to believe that pied-a-terres are less than 1% in NYC, particularly in the post covid era. Maybe paid off condos in NYC owned by people who also live in Florida aren't counted somehow? Seems like everyone with a net worth of $2.5mm has two properties.

My best friend's brother has a rent controlled manhattan apartment that sits vacant 80% of the time and is used as a crash pad for a rotating cast of ~12 people, what do you call that?

[chiefalchemist]

Or are corporate owned.

A good friend bought her Hell's Kithen flat (read: condo unit) from a Japanese company. Years ago I had another friend who worked for a company that had a sizeable place in the Village.

Anecdotal, but probably common enough.

[ch4s3]

There aren't that many. NYC housing data is sliced, diced, and studied by so many agencies, non-profits, think tanks, and so on that someone would notice. There's a marginal number of units that appear to largely unoccupied. Corporate and LLC ownership shows up in tax data and the totals are a drop in the bucket of the nearly 4 million units.