“I have happy tenants. I can remember being angry at my own landlords so I cherish the fact that people are here and I like making them happy,” Manny Parrish, a longtime music producer and not-quite-as-seasoned Brooklyn landlord, said last week.
Mr. Parrish inherited his childhood home in Bensonhurst around five years ago, and has had three different tenants live in the bottom floors of the three-story, semi-detached house (he lives on the top floor).
Mr. Parrish is just one among many in Brooklyn, a place chock-full of laid-back landowners who own no more than a few properties in sleepy and leafy neighborhoods in New York City’s most populous borough. Rockrose or Related or Rose, all massive Manhattan apartment landlords, Mr. Parrish is not.
Yes, the gulf between quaint old Kings County and bustling Gotham is shrinking—and will likely continue to do so—but when it comes to rental market economics and property ownership, the contrast between high-rise Manhattan and low-rise Brooklyn is still as wide as ever. At the same time, there is an ever-growing crop of new condominiums hitting the market in the borough, changing not only the outward appearance of Brooklyn, but the subsurface tectonics of the supply-and-demand fundamentals in the borough’s rental market.
For now, most of Brooklyn’s smaller landlords are living in a world apart from the rough-and-tumble Manhattan market, where rents are already falling in several neighborhoods, and panicky property owners are slashing rents, sometimes by hundreds of dollars, and offering any incentive they can think of to help put tenants in their units.
In Brooklyn: not so much.
“I have not seen significant decreases in monthly rents, and there has not been anything out of the ordinary compared to other years,” said Qiana Spellman, a broker with the Real Estate Group New York who specializes in Brooklyn properties.
Ms. Spellman has been working around Park Slope, Fort Greene, Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights for nearly three years, and she says that only two of the 20 properties she works for have started offering prospective tenants the sorts of incentives familiar on the other side of the East River.
According to Ms. Spellman, the Brooklyn market is going through typical winter doldrums, with rents falling slightly due to seasonal changes in the market. “Prices tend to drop in the winter, just because there are less people looking, so prices are dropping by around $75 to $100 a month,” she said.
No alarm bells, no apocalypse and, for the most part, no incentives.
LAST WEEK, Ideal Properties Group, a Brooklyn-based real estate company specializing in commercial and residential leasing, released a year-end rental market report for brownstone Brooklyn (which includes Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Carroll Gardens, Clinton Hill, Cobble Hill, Fort Greene, Gowanus, Park Slope, Prospect Heights and Windsor Terrace) that showed a surprising resiliency. While the inventory rates crept up in the fourth quarter of 2008 compared to the same period in 2007, rentals maintained their value, for the most part.
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