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Show HN: An interactive dashboard to explore NYC rentals data (leaseswap.nyc)

70 points by giulioco ↗ HN
historically, rentals in NYC have been pretty wild. the median 1BR in West Village as of July 2025 cost $5,750/month. about a month ago, NYC passed a law to ban broker fees which many predicted would have increased rents. I realized I had access to some original data from a previous project so I built a dashboard to help me visualize the changes and see for myself.

you can filter by neighborhoods, bedrooms, original source where the rentals were posted, and select a timeframe.

this is still a work in progress, so apologies in advance for any issues you encounter. I would love any feedback on how to improve it and/or what other visualizations i should add. known issues include:

- some neighborhoods like Prospect Park will also automatically select other, unrelated, neighborhoods when selected

- sometimes even when you filter by 1BR it will also include some 2BR

- some units might have been listed on multiple platforms, effectively counting as duplicates

14 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 42.2 ms ] thread
jeffbee
Excellent presentation. NY and every other city should have a lease registry so you don't have to guess from advertisements.
cuuupid
The average 2br rent for the last 2 years was $4,536

The average for the last month is is $5,738

This is a 25%+ increase, let's say around 10% of that can be accounted for via seasonal increases.

The almost certain incoming mayor has pushed for rent stabilization/control/freeze. Let's assume this restricts increases to 10% Y/Y similar to cities like Seattle, this would cause at least a 5% recessionary pressure for housing suppliers.

The big question - is the increase due to greed among the supply (i.e. this pressure is good for the market), due to existing market pressures (i.e. this pressure may cause a wider recession in the housing market), or due to a bubble (i.e. this pressure may pop it, for better or worse)?

codingwagie
theres alot of wealthy people in NYC and its only increasing. in neighborhoods like west village or soho, the majority of people are not working corporate jobs. they are paying 7.5-20k a month in rent out of their pockets.
msukkarieh
I've never lived in NYC - are median studio apts in West Village really $6k? Website looks awesome but I'm hoping that the data isn't true
mbStavola
Amusingly, selecting Bay Ridge in Brooklyn also seems to select Westerleigh in Staten Island; I know Bay Ridge shares a congressional district with Staten Island, but I assure you we're still a part of Brooklyn.
asdev
you should use multimodal AI to filter out apartments that are below minimum living standards(fake 1 beds, heinous layouts, apartments with 0 light etc) which there are a lot of. I think prices would be more accurate that way.
rprend
I think it’s important to note that this is asking rent, not what people are paying on average. Landlords do tricks to make rental history appear more expensive than it was, and every online posting should be read as aspirational price, not a real one. Listing inflation helps increase price expectations for the future, and has helped drive the crazy rent inflation NYC has seen post covid (exceeding other expensive metros like SF).

For example- my current apartment had a crazy high lease concession. The paper rent is 30% higher than what I pay. The only inconvenience is that i had to pay a security deposit at the paper rent, not actual rent. It’s like a software business giving 2 months free then multiplying MRR by 12, not taking churn into account. I am moving out after a year.

Eawrig05
Realtors pull a similar trick: instead of dropping the price on Zillow (which flags it), they delist and relist at a lower price. Zillow treats it like a new listing, so the price history looks clean. Totally skews market transparency.
solumos
Something seems off with this data. Specifically, DUMBO-Vinegar Hill—Downtown Brooklyn—Boerum Hill has a median rent of $2600, which seems very suspicious.

Also, there's no data for Crown Heights North.

AvAn12
This was on The NY Times website's real estate section for many years.
cyberax
So NYC needs more density to lower down housing costs, right? Right?

Just build more. Sure.

adi_hn07
Do you have API access to the listing platforms or do you use web scraping? Really nice dashboard UI. One bug I noticed, on signing up with google I land on the sign up page again, instead of being redirected to the analytics dashboard.

Awesome web app overall, would love to have leaseswap on https://superlaun.ch !!