Apartment Rents and Condo Prices Trickle Up, While Office Space Languishes
The Downtown Alliance’s quarterly analysis of Lower Manhattan real estate trends, covering the period of April through June of this year, finds that apartment costs (both rentals and owner-occupied units) are inching upward, while the value of office space is treading water.
Residents who rent are now paying a median of $4,790, which is 6.4 percent higher than the same figure for Manhattan as a whole, and barely a rounding error lower than the $4,795 recorded for Lower Manhattan in the first three months of this year. This is also the second-highest quarterly value ever documented for the community. As the Alliance report notes, “this rent figure is not only up over the year, but also 20 percent above the pre-pandemic median.”
The median purchase price for condominium and cooperative units jumped to $1.39 million, 23 percent higher than in the previous quarter, and “putting the district 31 percent above the median this time last year,” the Alliance notes. The median local price for homes is also approximately 16 percent higher than the corresponding metric for Manhattan as a whole.
On the retail front, 23 new establishments opened their doors in Lower Manhattan in the second quarter (approximately two-thirds of which are food and beverage businesses), including Brazilian steakhouse Fogo de Chão in the World Trade Center complex. During the same period, four retail businesses closed their doors: Mongolian Gallery (in the Oculus), 9 to 5 Fashion Outlet (on Nassau Street), URVet (on Chambers Street), and Di Fara Pizza (in the Seaport).
In a category that has displayed distress for several years, the commercial/office sector has begun to show signs of life, with more than three quarters of a million square feet of new leases signed in the previous 90 days. This benchmark is 31 percent above the same period in 2024, 12 percent above than the five-year average.
Even as local office vacancy rates remain high at 22.8 percent, asking rents, which have been in decline since 2020, “increased over the quarter by 2.1 percent, a growth rate not seen since 2018,” the organization notes.
“While some macroeconomic uncertainty remains, a second straight quarter of meaningful gains in the Lower Manhattan office market is cause for optimism,” Downtown Alliance president Jessica Lappin said.