This apartment layout is wildly in demand in New York — and nowhere to be found.
New York City families are scrambling to get their hands on three-bedroom rentals, but all the remotely affordable ones have seemingly vanished from the market in recent years, according to recent reporting from Curbed.
“A three-bedroom is super rare, super rare,” South and Central Brooklyn-focused Corcoran agent Lisa James told the publication.
Versions of the floorplan that actually offer three bedrooms worth of space (and are not just stingily subdivided former one- or two-bedrooms) have long been needles in the NYC real estate haystack. But a confluence of recent trends have made them even more difficult to pin down and much pricier.
For starters, the limited supply of homes in the city’s suburbs are now competitively priced and frequently the subject of bidding wars, which puts them out of reach for many growing families. Those would-be residents then choose to remain in the city, which creates a chain reaction of sorts. Unable to size up to a three-bedroom, families in two-bedrooms stay put, which in turn prevents new families in one-bedrooms from taking over their leases, associate Douglas Elliman broker Noble Black told Curbed.
“All those areas of the housing market trickle into each other,” Black said. “It’s a sticking point.”
Further contributing to the shortage is the fact that it’s much cheaper for affordable housing developers to build smaller units, so many of the more economical rentals now available are studios, one-bedrooms and, less frequently, two-bedrooms — but hardly ever threes.
And families looking to rent the limited quantity of unoccupied three-bedrooms that do exist have to compete with single people splitting the rent between three separate incomes.
Combined, this results in three-bedrooms going for an eye-watering $25,000 a month, according to one recent press release viewed by Curbed, and situations like Nat Serrano’s. Unable to find a decent three-bedroom, the app developer has been sharing a bed with his wife and three young kids in their Upper West Side one-bedroom for three years.
“We can pay up to $5,000 a month, but there’s nothing,” he told Curbed. “It’s impossible.”
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