Show HN: An interactive dashboard to explore NYC rentals data

[giulioco]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[Eawrig05]

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.

[jeffbee]

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

[cuuupid]

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]

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-...

[hshdhdhj4444]

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.

[personjerry]

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

Summer inflation is much more than that

[codingwagie]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

[chimeracoder]

> 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

The West Village is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the country. In around 2010, it was the most expensive zip code in the country.

That's due to a combination of: old buildings, very little new construction, extremely gentrified neighborhood, and NYU eating up all of the real estate in the neighborhood.

That said, the map is slightly mislabeled: what's labeled as the West Village is actually Greenwich Village, and the West Village is a subset of that. This map labels places as far east as Astor Place as the West Village, which is not correct.

[jeffbee]

That is completely true, unfortunately. There are a lot of people in NY. All the demand components — longevity/natural increase, wages, net migration — are increasing and the supply is in stasis, so the price has to rise. Under these conditions you should expect surprisingly non-linear behavior of the market price.

[VWWHFSfQ]

Housing in Greenwich Village (the broader area including the West Village) has become outrageous in recent decades. A significant reason, but not the only reason, is because the main NYU campus is located in the middle of the small area and doesn't provide nearly enough housing (only ~20%) for the on-campus enrollment.

NYU's on-campus enrollment is also roughly 50% foreign students. I don't have any data about it, but just from experience I've suspected that foreign students are willing and able to pay higher prices for housing.

[screye]

NYC is deceptive. It's dense, so you don't realize you're crossing a city's worth of people in a 10 minute walk. Median studios in Beverly hills being $6k wouldn't surprise anyone. The Tribeca-Greenwich-West village-Chelsea stretch effectively the same.

Walk a few minutes north from there, and you'll reach hell's kitchen. Much much cheaper.

[reactordev]

Ever since sex and the city of the 90s, rent in NYC has skyrocketed more than anywhere else in the world. $6k is cheap. There’s places that are $20k…

(no correlation with the show, just ironic)

[asdev]

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]

Woah this looks really cool!

[AvAn12]

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

[suncemoje]

Lovable?

[cyberax]

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

Just build more. Sure.