Guides
Guides for New York City building owners
9 guides to renting out an apartment in New York City, written for the owner doing it rather than the renter reading it. They cover setting the rent, preparing and photographing the unit, running showings, deciding between a free month and a lower rent, and the two sets of rules that carry penalties.
What should you do before a unit goes on the market?
Settle the rent, decide what is worth fixing, and get the photographs right. These three are decided before anything is live, and each of them is harder to undo afterward.
How to price an apartment for rent in NYC
Price off what comparable apartments have signed for, not what other listings are asking. Five tests for a real comparable, how to adjust for your unit, and why listing high to come down later costs more than it saves.
Preparing an apartment for rent
What is worth fixing between tenants and what is not, in the order the work should happen, with the repairs a New York City owner has to make either way.
Rental listing photos, floor plans and virtual staging
The shot list a listing needs, how to shoot an apartment so it looks like itself, why a floor plan answers what photographs cannot, and the disclosure rules now being written for digitally altered listing images.
When is the best time to list?
When New York asking rents and listing counts peak, why holding a unit empty until summer loses money, and how the lease term you sign now decides which season your next vacancy lands in.
How do you get it rented once it is live?
Answer inquiries the same day, show the apartment when renters are free, and read what the traffic is telling you. If it stalls, work out which of the six causes it is before changing anything.
Showings that turn into applications
When to schedule showings, whether to run an open house or private appointments, what to have ready so a renter can apply on the spot, and how to follow up the same day.
Why isn’t my apartment renting?
Six reasons a New York City rental sits, the signal that identifies each one, and how long a listing should actually take. The diagnostic to read before you drop the rent.
A free month or a lower rent?
What net effective rent is, what a free month protects that a rent cut gives away, and the jump at renewal that often makes the lower rent the better choice for a small owner.
What do the rules require of you?
Two of them carry real money. The FARE Act moved the broker fee and added disclosure duties with a penalty schedule behind them, and New York caps what you can charge an applicant and limits what you are allowed to check.
The FARE Act, explained for owners
Who pays the broker fee in New York City, what has to appear in the listing and in the tenant’s file, the exact penalty amounts, and where the litigation landed. The most detailed guide on this site.
Tenant screening rules for NYC owners
What you may ask an applicant and what you may not, the $20 application fee cap, the order screening has to happen in, and how to apply one written standard to everyone.
What else is on this site?
Two things that are not guides: a calculator and the neighborhood data we keep current.
The cost-of-vacancy calculator turns a rent and a number of empty weeks into the figure that decides most of the questions above.
The neighborhood pages carry current median asking rents and listing counts for the seven Brooklyn neighborhoods where we lease most, refreshed monthly from StreetEasy.
And how our leasing process works sets out what we do at each stage, and what we need from you.
No charge, no obligation
Would you rather just ask someone?
Send us the address and we will come back within one business day with what we think it rents for, what has signed nearby, and what we would change before it lists.