Exclusive | NYC’s rent-stabilized landlords rush to sell ahead of Mamdani

On Election Day in Astoria, Ellie stood in a line that curled around the block of her polling site. 

The 31-year-old paralegal, who declined to use her real name for privacy reasons, earns $78,000 annually — and has been priced out of three apartments in five years. Her rent jumped $520 in the last three years alone to $2,270, not including utilities, and that’s even living with two roommates, each paying that amount, in a market-rate unit.

She voted that day, she said, because she was “tired of feeling like the city was pushing me out.” And, like many, she backed Zohran Mamdani — the Assembly member who ran on rent freezes for stabilized homes, tenant protections and a promise to, as she put it, “fight the right people.”

Mamdani won by 50.4% of the vote that day — including 78% of voters under age 30, and 66% of those between ages 30 to 44 — regardless of the fact that his proposals were broad, with little to no details behind them. They even had little to no support from fellow Democrat, Gov. Kathy Hochul, who nevertheless endorsed him.

What his victory did show was that there’s an affordability crisis in the city, and voters were eager to support anyone who pledged to bring the notoriously high costs of living under control.

The affordability crisis has been building in large part since late 2021 — the tail end of Bill de Blasio’s tenure as mayor. Following mass vacancies and discounts during the pandemic, rents began soaring as COVID concessions ended that autumn. They’ve only grown steeper.

“It’s been a real roller coaster,” appraiser Jonathan Miller, of Miller Samuel, a real estate appraiser, told The Post. “Rents zoomed back after their correction in 2020, surged in 2021 and 2022, went up again significantly in 2023 and in 2025 went up even more.”

Douglas Elliman’s latest market report, which Miller authors, shows just how little slack remains.

The average rent in Manhattan hit an all-time high at a staggering $5,651 per month in October — up 9.4% year-over-year. Meanwhile, rental inventory is down 6.9% from last year. In Manhattan, inventory is down for the 19th consecutive month.

“Salaries are not rising as fast as rents are,” Miller said. “At some point the affordability becomes completely unmanageable for most [residents]. We’re not there yet and I suspect we’re probably a few years away from that. But that’s the trajectory at the moment.”

Against this backdrop, Mamdani surged in the polls. He promised to freeze rents in roughly a million stabilized apartments and borrow $70 billion to build 200,000 permanently affordable units over the next decade.

“I voted for Mamdani mostly because of his rent freeze plan and overall promise to make the city more affordable,” said 24-year-old Julia Musilli, a freelance content creator and social media manager who lives in Williamsburg with two roommates.

She lost her production job in July, but still has to pay $1,550 in rent and an additional $1,550 monthly for student loans. There is a way to make it work, but it’s tight.

“I have a lot of side hustles and social media bringing income in, so that definitely helps,” she said, adding that each month she can bring in up to $5,000, but saving money these days — as opposed to when she had a salaried position — is more challenging. Her friends, she says, are in the same boat.

“I do think that everybody is stressed about it, and everybody’s thinking about it all the time,” she said of their financial well-being.

Samir Lavingia, 31, a Fordham University law student, voted for Mamdani in support of his policies promoting more housing construction in the city. He worked for Google and Twitter before going back to school. During that time he lived in a Union Square apartment where his rent jumped to $4,900 from $3,600 in a two-year span.

“There’s no way I can afford that,” he recalled. So he had to decamp for Midtown, where he now pays $4,050 — up from $3,700 in 2023 when he moved in. Beyond the roller-coaster pricing, he had to deal with an exhausting search at a time of low inventory.

“I will say that I definitely cried at my desk when I was looking for apartments, because it was just really hard to find something within my budget,” he said.

The budget has also been cramped for 48-year-old Marcela M., who also declined to provide her full name for reasons of privacy, a mother living with her 10-year-old son — and a roommate — in Bushwick. She’s separated from her husband, who lives in another apartment with a roommate, and is an artist whose income dropped to $30,000 this year from roughly $55,000 in 2024.

“You choose to live in New York because of the people, because of how special it is, how open-minded it is,” she said. “You find friends that really care about you and a community that understands you … It’s my home. But it’s become very expensive,” she told The Post.

As for her physical home, it’s a rent-stabilized two-bedroom railroad (with a makeshift wall that gives her son his own room) for which she pays $1,750 per month.

“At the end, it’s a lot of what I spend and it’s not that much what I make,” she said.

But while the tenants struggling to pay rent embrace Mamdani’s proposal, city landlords who manage rent-stabilized housing — which accounts for 42% of rentals in New York City — are sounding the alarm. So much so that many are trying to sell at shockingly low prices and get out.

“It’s a money loser to own a rent-stabilized building,” said Charles Olson, a broker with Keller Williams Realty Empire in Brooklyn.

Right now, he’s marketing a massive 30-unit, 22,200-square-foot rent-stabilized property at the edge of Crown Heights for $2.27 million. For contrast, a nearby three-bedroom condo recently listed for $2.29 million.

“We all know that landlords who own rent-stabilized buildings are restricted in how much they can raise their rents, but the cost of inflation is far outstripping their ability to keep up with the cost of repairs,” he added. “The cost of lumber, the cost of labor, everything is going up.”

That’s why a number of rent-stabilized buildings are now for sale at bargain prices — landlords want out.

In affluent Park Slope, an eight-unit stabilized property asks $1.56 million. At 7,208 square feet, that breaks down to $217 per square foot — far below Brooklyn’s overall average of $1,075 per-square-foot cost for condos and $893 for one- to three-family homes, according to third quarter Douglas Elliman numbers.

Another sprawling 5,600-square-foot building located nearby listed in July for $1.83 million.

Meanwhile other buildings in the area are slashing their prices — a 5,000-square-foot building with six units recently lowered its asking price to $1.75 million from $1.79 million. And another 6,000-square-foot stabilized building two blocks from it just saw its third price cut to $1.55 million from the original price of $1.59 million.

“Most landlords are walking away from [their buildings],” said landlord Adrian Lawrence. He has an edifice, which he co-owns with family members, that is being marketed for sale by Olson. “They’re not making a profit and they’re not going [to] put their life savings and investments into these buildings without the ability to make back the money with some profitability.”

“The rent freeze, I think, is ill-conceived,” he added. “If you tell a person they can’t increase rents in a one- to two-year period, that is dangerous because the costs are rising.”

Issues surrounding the financial well-being of stabilized units predate Mamdani’s mayoral proposals — and have worsened during successive Democratic administrations. At least 50,000 city rent-stabilized homes now sit vacant — an exponential rise from the 5,000 kept empty in 2019.

The mounting vacancies trace back to that year’s Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act. It eliminated landlords’ ability to raise rents when tenants moved out, which allowed them to recover costs from making renovations for a new renter’s arrival.

These days, landlords told The Post, it doesn’t make sense to pay these renovation costs should stabilized rents be frozen in place.

“There are more and more of these rent-stabilized apartments disappearing from the market because the landlords can’t get them into a condition that they can rent them in,” said Olson.

And, say critics, it will get worse.

“This is an issue that will perpetuate and compound if nothing is done. To have units coming offline in the middle of a housing crisis to me is a policy failure,” said Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association. “It’s disappointing and irresponsible. We have units we can bring back online.”

Adding to the issues for rent-stabilized property owners: Democrat-passed measures on utility regulation and climate change, including a 2019 law requiring buildings over 25,000 square feet to swap oil and gas-fired heating systems for electric heat pumps in order to slash emissions 40% by the end of this decade. 

Critics say this will only make costs balloon further.

“For decades, the New York City government has passed unfunded mandates that raise rents,” Burgos added. “They just never admit that they are the ones causing the city to be unaffordable. Or in the case of rent-stabilized housing, they are the ones causing buildings to go bankrupt.”

Just last month, a new report from a nonprofit estimated that Mamdani would need to give landlords a billion-dollar bailout so they don’t default on their mortgages.

Burgos added, “Well-intentioned laws to inspect boilers, reduce greenhouse gases or require facade work on aging buildings come with high costs. And when a building’s rent revenue is capped, those costs are either paid by deferring other maintenance or simply can’t get done. It is a key factor in the current fiscal distress gripping regulated housing.”

As for landlord profits, while average net operating income was up 8% between 2022 and 2023, according to the Income and Expense Study (with Manhattan-based landlords making the biggest profits and those in The Bronx barely breaking even), 2025 paints a different story.

Data provided by the Small Property Owners of New York shows The Bronx has some buildings with rent-stabilized units in current danger of default. One, a 22-unit property, faces a nearly $82,000 annual loss because rents are too low to keep up with rising costs.

Overall, according to a November NYU Furman Center report, one-third of rent-stabilized housing in the city is losing money. Declines in net-operating income, when compounded with rent freezes, limit landlords’ ability to save money and handle general increases in costs.

According to the report, median gross income per unit in buildings with more than 90% of stabilized units — which account for roughly 49% of all stabilized apartments — fell by 9% after adjusting for inflation between 2019 and 2025. The median rents in these buildings was $1,344 so far in 2025, meaning not enough to keep up with costs.

One city landlord told The Post that, in the best years, the most profit margin he makes on fully stabilized buildings is 4 to 5% — but many times, those buildings net 0%.

While many voters like Ellie and Musilli voted to stop prices from getting even more out of hand, freezing rents may actually end up destroying the rental market even more, diminishing the housing stock and pushing up competition on all available units — and ultimately pricing out a young generation altogether.

“A lot of Mamdani’s goals are speaking to a subset of the population that is struggling to financially keep up in the city, addressing those constituents is important — but doing so with people who understand the broader implications is even more important,” said Jeff Fox, principal of Foxy Development, a Bronx-based developer of affordable and senior housing.

Ask Ann Korchak, board president of the Small Property Owners of New York and the landlord of a 10-unit building on the Upper West Side with mixed stabilized and market units. Her annual property taxes have more than tripled since 2006, utilities are more expensive and labor needed for repairs now costs more, too.

“Especially when you’re talking about the rent-stabilized units, every unfunded mandate is a cost we have to take on, but we cannot get any of it recovered through the rents,” she said.

“You know, everybody feels bad when the restaurant closes, but no one gives a s–t about us,” she added.