NYC Listings Check: $2,750 Studios to $3.4M NoHo Oddities

Landing an apartment in New York has never been simple, but Curbed’s latest weekly listings roundup argues it has rarely been tougher than it is right now. According to the outlet, even rough studios are renting for thousands of dollars, with lines of prospective tenants at the door. Its answer is a curated list of the listings that are actually worth a look, a price, or a tour.

The pricing pattern Curbed flags is hard to miss. A surprising number of two-bedroom apartments now cost more than $4,000 a month to rent and more than $1.5 million to buy, the outlet reports. It also notes a cluster of houses for sale hovering near the $2 million mark, mostly in Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy.

On the rental side, the range runs wide. A studio at $2,750 a month comes with a turn-of-the-century fireplace that Curbed calls fabulous despite the floor space it consumes. A one-bedroom at $2,900 offers sunlight and parquet floors, while a $3,850 one-bedroom is described as a charming floor-through with wide planks. Another one-bedroom at $2,600 gets credit for being easy on the renter’s wallet, even if the listing photos were shot at night.

Higher up the ladder, Curbed is more skeptical. A three-bedroom brownstone duplex at $5,500 is called a criminal price given the state of its bathroom, though the outlet suggests a price drop could be coming. A two-bedroom at $6,100 lacks a washer-dryer, and an $8,000 three-bedroom prewar has a kitchen and bathroom that, in the writer’s view, don’t scream $8,000. Among the standouts is a $4,750 prewar one-bedroom in an elevator-and-doorman building on Riverside Drive, praised as lovely and in great condition.

The for-sale picks show how far buyers’ budgets have to stretch. A $1.65 million three-bedroom with double-height ceilings and parquet floors puzzles the writer, who wonders why it is still on the market. A $1.75 million two-bedroom in a converted church on Hicks Street recently took a $46,000 price cut. Curbed praises its bones and double-pane casement windows, while panning the developer’s bathroom tile. An Eastern Parkway prewar three-bedroom also lists at $1.75 million, and a loft near the Navy Yard asks $1.825 million for one bedroom, which the outlet calls a crazy price for the location.

The roundup also includes a few for-fun entries. A $3.4 million two-bedroom in NoHo, built around exposed brick and what the outlet describes as a subterranean Roman bathing complex, is included purely for curiosity. A $3.495 million four-bedroom Gilded Age mansion, in Curbed’s words, looks like HGTV got its hands on it, though balustrades, stained glass and mahogany built-ins survived the makeover.

For those with an imagined $4 million to spend, Curbed closes with two fantasy properties: a four-bedroom, four-and-a-half-bath townhouse on West 71st Street with 3,520 square feet and original details to restore, and a two-bedroom at the Apthorp, one of the city’s grandest prewar buildings, at roughly half the square footage.

The writer frames the whole exercise as a deliberate dose of optimism after reader feedback on a gloomier column last week. Optimism, the outlet jokes, is a vital part of the city-dweller’s DNA. For anyone searching this fall, the takeaway is practical: asking prices are high, price cuts do happen, and details like laundry, light and layout still separate a fair deal from an overreach.