I Tracked Every New StreetEasy Listing for a Year

In early January 2025, I started tracking every new rental listing that appeared on StreetEasy. Studios, penthouses, sketchy basement apartments with "natural light" in the description. The tracker runs continuously. When a new listing goes up, we grab it.

Fifteen months later, I'm sitting on 277,701 listings. I hadn't really looked at the full dataset until this week. So I pulled it all into a database and started asking questions.

Some of this confirmed what I expected. Some of it genuinely surprised me. Here's all of it.

The seasonal curve is real, and it's not subtle

Everyone says NYC rentals are seasonal. Here's what that actually looks like in raw listing counts:

• January 2025: 9,491
• February: 12,387
• March: 19,740
• April: 21,473
• May: 25,309
• June: 24,180
• July: 27,303 (peak)
• August: 24,360
• September: 22,559
• October: 16,144
• November: 11,139
• December: 15,434
• January 2026: 17,538
• February 2026: 16,149
• March 2026 (partial): 14,495

July had nearly three times the listings that January did. 27,303 vs 9,491. If you're apartment hunting in January, you're choosing from a third of the inventory that someone searching in July sees. Whether that's good or bad depends on your strategy. Less competition, but also less to choose from.

The November dip is the real dead zone. Just 11,139 new listings the entire month. If a landlord is listing in November, they probably need it rented.

December bouncing back to 15K surprised me. I figured the holidays would keep things quiet, but apparently landlords start pushing inventory before the new year.

Where the listings are

I wanted to know which neighborhoods produce the most rental listings. The top 20, ranked by total listings over the full tracking period:

1. Bushwick — 12,620
2. Williamsburg — 12,348
3. Astoria — 8,049
4. East Village — 7,702
5. Hell's Kitchen — 7,118
6. Upper West Side — 7,093
7. Crown Heights — 6,958
8. Flatbush — 6,787
9. Stuyvesant Heights — 6,429
10. Yorkville — 6,426
11. Lenox Hill — 5,781
12. Bedford-Stuyvesant — 5,579
13. Hunters Point — 4,970
14. Greenpoint — 4,539
15. Murray Hill — 4,271
16. Downtown Brooklyn — 4,194
17. Financial District — 3,963
18. Chelsea — 3,959
19. West Village — 3,637
20. Kips Bay — 3,586

Bushwick is the listing king of New York City and it's not even close. 12,620 listings in 15 months — that's roughly 28 new listings going up every single day. Williamsburg is right behind it. Between just those two neighborhoods, you're looking at about 25,000 listings. Nearly 9% of all rental inventory tracked came from two adjacent Brooklyn neighborhoods.

Astoria taking third isn't surprising if you've been paying attention to Queens, but the gap between it and the Brooklyn leaders is worth noting. Brooklyn dominates the volume game.

The Manhattan neighborhoods that show up — East Village, Hell's Kitchen, Upper West Side — are all in the 6,000-7,700 range. High volume, but not touching Brooklyn.

Flatbush at 6,787 is interesting. That's more listings than Chelsea, more than the Financial District, more than the West Village. It doesn't get nearly the same attention.

The price picture

Median rent across all NYC listings: $3,766. Average: $4,505. That gap between median and average tells you something — there's a long tail of expensive listings pulling the average up.

For New Jersey listings in the dataset (yeah, StreetEasy covers parts of NJ now): median $2,950, average $3,326. About $800 less per month at the median.

Broken down by bedroom count:

• Studios: $3,130 median (44,551 listings)
• 1-bedrooms: $3,449 median (102,534 listings)
• 2-bedrooms: $4,000 median (86,565 listings)
• 3-bedrooms: $4,299 median (34,961 listings)
• 4-bedrooms: $5,200 median (7,693 listings)
• 5-bedrooms: $7,474 median (1,140 listings)

The jump from studio to 1-bedroom is only $319. The jump from 1-bedroom to 2-bedroom is $551. But going from 4-bedroom to 5-bedroom? $2,274. The per-bedroom cost curve isn't linear — it gets steep fast once you're past 3 bedrooms.

Most expensive vs cheapest neighborhoods

The priciest neighborhoods (median rent, minimum 200 listings):

1. Central Park South — $8,500
2. Tribeca — $7,789
3. Hudson Square — $7,625
4. Noho — $6,295
5. Flatiron — $6,135
6. Vinegar Hill — $6,050
7. NoMad — $6,000
8. West Chelsea — $5,770
9. Stuyvesant Town/PCV — $5,610
10. Soho — $5,500

Central Park South at $8,500 median. That means half the listings there are above $8,500. That's a studio-and-1-bedroom median, not a penthouse median.

Vinegar Hill at #6 caught me off guard. It's a tiny neighborhood near DUMBO — maybe 10 square blocks. But it had 883 listings over the period, enough to be statistically meaningful, and the median was $6,050. That's more expensive than NoMad.

Now the cheapest:

1. University Heights — $1,999
2. Bath Beach — $2,000
3. Briarwood — $2,150
4. Bensonhurst — $2,250
5. Jamaica Estates — $2,262
6. West Side (Jersey City area) — $2,285
7. Far Rockaway — $2,299
8. Bayonne — $2,315
9. Bay Ridge — $2,375
10. Jersey City — $2,382

University Heights in the Bronx, just barely under $2,000 at the median. A Central Park South apartment at median costs 4.25x what a University Heights apartment does. Same city.

Bath Beach in southern Brooklyn at $2,000 flat is a neighborhood most people outside of NYC have never heard of. It's quiet, mostly residential, near the water. Two grand a month.

Bedroom count breakdown

What's actually on the market?

• Studios (0 bed): 16.0%
• 1-bedrooms: 36.9%
• 2-bedrooms: 31.2%
• 3-bedrooms: 12.6%
• 4-bedrooms: 2.8%
• 5+ bedrooms: 0.5%

More than a third of all NYC rental listings are 1-bedrooms. If you and a friend want to split a 2-bedroom, you're working with 31% of the market. If you need a 3-bedroom for a family? 12.6%. And if you're trying to find a 4-bedroom rental in New York? Good luck — that's less than 3% of all inventory.

The studio number being 16% is lower than I expected. I would have guessed closer to 25%, given how many buildings in Manhattan seem like they're 80% studios. Turns out the outer boroughs balance that out with larger units.

Also: there is a listing in the dataset for a 35-bedroom apartment in NoMad listed at $13,800/month. That's a data entry error. Probably. I choose not to investigate further.

The fee situation

Only 18.2% of listings are no-fee. That means over 80% of rental listings on StreetEasy involve a broker fee. The median rent on no-fee apartments is actually higher — $3,999 vs $3,600 for fee apartments. Landlords on no-fee listings tend to price the fee into the rent, which makes sense when you think about it. You're paying either way. The question is whether you want a higher monthly or a lump sum upfront.

About 38,845 listings (14%) offered at least one month free. The median concession was 1 month. These are mostly the big new development buildings trying to fill units — a month free on a $4,000 apartment is functionally a 8% discount on your first year, which sounds better as "1 month free!" than "$333 off per month."

Building types

This one tells a story about what NYC's rental stock actually looks like:

• Rental buildings: 64% (the big dedicated rental buildings)
• Condos: 9% (owners renting out their units)
• Mixed use: 5%
• Two-family homes: 4%
• Three-family homes: 4%
• Co-ops: 4%
• Houses: 3%

Nearly 13% of rental listings come from two-family and three-family homes. That's the classic NYC small landlord — someone who owns a brownstone and rents out a floor or two. It's a bigger slice of the market than co-ops.

What surprised me

Bushwick having more listings than any Manhattan neighborhood. I knew it was big, but 12,620 in 15 months is a different level. That's a neighborhood with serious turnover.

November being as dead as it is. 11,139 listings. If you want leverage in negotiations, that might be your month. Landlords listing in November aren't doing it for fun.

Vinegar Hill's pricing. A neighborhood most New Yorkers couldn't point to on a map has a median rent higher than NoMad and Soho.

And the 35-bedroom apartment in NoMad. I know I said I wouldn't investigate, but it lives rent-free in my head (unlike its $13,800/month asking price).

All the data, free

Everything I've been collecting is available at firstmovernyc.com/open-data. All of it. Filter by neighborhood, price range, bedroom count, whatever you want. I built this because I was apartment hunting and got tired of not having actual data. Turns out other people wanted it too.

If you want to check whether your rent is reasonable compared to what's actually listing in your neighborhood, we built a rent check tool for that.

And if any of the neighborhoods above caught your eye, every one of them has a dedicated page with current listings and price stats — just hit firstmovernyc.com/neighborhoods and pick yours.

The tracker is still running. Ask me again in a year and we'll have half a million listings to look at.