Even as people continue to flock from New York City, rent is still hitting record highs.
In Manhattan, home to Central Park, the Empire State Building, and Wall Street, average rent in July was $5,588 a month, according to new data prepared by Miller Samuel for the real-estate company Douglas Elliman. This was a record high, up 2.2% from the previous month and 9.3% from the same time a year ago.
The average rental price in Manhattan was $3,278 for a studio, $4,443 for a one-bed apartment, $6,084 for a two-bed, and $10,673 for a three-bed, the data shows. The average rental price per square foot was $84.74, a 3.2% increase over June.
For luxury rentals in Manhattan, defined as the top 10% of rentals, the average monthly price was $15,568, a 14.6% increase year-over-year.
In Brooklyn, average rental prices reached a new high of $4,347 in July, a 6.4% rise on June and up 11.9% compared to July 2022, per the Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel data.
And in northwestern Queens, residents paid a record $4,003 on average, up 9.0% from June and 16.8% from last July, the data shows.
The surging average rental prices across New York City come despite people moving out in droves in recent years.
According to population estimates from the US Census Bureau, the city's population fell by 5.3% from April 2020 to July 2022 to around 8.34 million as the dramatic rise in remote work during the pandemic pushed people to move to states with lower taxes and living costs, fewer lockdown restrictions, and better lifestyle amenities.
Even before the pandemic, people were leaving the city for other places in the US. Between 2013 and 2019, on average nearly 17,000 more people moved out of New York County, which encompasses Manhattan, to somewhere else in the US than moved in, per Census Bureau estimates. Net international migration fell over the same time period, though it remained positive.
It's not just a trend limited to New York City. In 2021, around 287,000 people moved from other states to New York State, whereas 571,000 people left the state to live elsewhere in the country, Census Bureau data shows.
People moving from New York State made up the biggest proportion of people moving to Florida in 2021, at more than 90,000 people. Many people who left New York also moved to neighboring states like Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New Jersey.
New York City and surrounding areas like Long Island had some of the US' highest rates of negative net domestic migration between 2021 and 2022.
