Last week I had a post go viral in r/nyc for a free rental advice tool I made and 15,000 redditors in new york submitted their rent data. I crunched the numbers and created a free seasonal rent analysis showing the outcomes. Doing all of this as a hobby project:

TLDR: The best time of year to sign a lease is right now:

    Cheapest: December (-10% vs average)
    Most expensive: July (+10% vs average)
    Total swing: ~20% difference peak to trough

That's roughly $8000 saved each year on a typical NYC apartment just from timing alone.

I'd been hearing this for years but never actually seen it in data form before. Explanations from what I understand: People don't move during the holidays. Vacancy rates climb to 4.5% in winter vs under 2% in summer. Landlords get desperate—72-78% offer concessions (free months, waived fees) in winter vs almost none in peak season.

Meanwhile, June-August is chaos. College grads flood the market, families move when school's out, apartments go in hours, and landlords have zero incentive to negotiate.

Real estate agents are pretty clued onto this and anyone who has tried to sign a winter lease has probably been asked to sign it for 18 months instead of 12 so that it ends in the summer (this happened to me when I moved here too!)

I made a little plot showing the covid impact on the data too.

Hope this is interesting to some of you! Happy to answer any questions or add any additional features/diagrams that people might find useful.

Interesting secondary finding: negotiation power correlates inversely with vacancy rates (obvious in hindsight, but the magnitude surprised me—85% negotiation success in Jan vs 15% in Jul).

Tool is free, this is a hobby project of mine, no sign up required etc.

Hope this is interesting to some of you! Happy to answer any questions or add any additional features/diagrams that people might find useful.