The Q at Parkside

(for those for whom the Parkside Q is their hometrain)

News and Nonsense from the Brooklyn neighborhood of Lefferts and environs, or more specifically a neighborhood once known as Melrose Park. Sometimes called Lefferts Gardens. Or Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. Or PLG. Or North Flatbush. Or Caledonia (west of Ocean). Or West Pigtown. Across From Park Slope. Under Crown Heights. Near Drummer's Grove. The Side of the Park With the McDonalds. Jackie Robinson Town. Home of Lefferts Manor. West Wingate. Near Kings County Hospital. Or if you're coming from the airport in taxi, maybe just Flatbush is best.

Thursday, July 10, 2014

Lefferts Rents Rising Faster Than Billyburg

Gotta say that Rachel Holiday Smith at DNA Info is doing a bang-up job covering our neighborhood. Her latest scoop pulls out the data from an MNS Real Estate Report that cites the Lefferts neighborhood's 6 1/2 percent jump in ONE MONTH this year. Holy Mother of God; that's cray cray, y'all, and as the Q likes to say, it's simply not sustainable, and certainly NOT regular ol' market movement. More on that in a post I'll write later tonight, as my eyes have been opened to how some of the big money players effectively manipulate the cost of buildings, thereby manipulating the incentive to push rents higher and higher, and poor folks out. It's an ugly business, and as usual, the buck stops at Wall Street. With help from Wall Street's back door man, Uncle Sam.

From Smith's piece:

Combining studios, one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms, average rents in Prospect-Lefferts increased from $1,751 to $1,864 per month between May and June of this year, a 6.43 percent increase according to a report by MNS Real Estate. That beat out other hot neighborhoods like Bushwick, Crown Heights and Williamsburg that MNS analyzed. The report did not include all of Brooklyn, instead focusing on the northern neighborhoods from Park Slope to Greenpoint.

1 comment:

babs said...

Three quibbles there, if you will: 1. The MNS report is based only on exclusive listings; open listings don't make it into the calculation. These real estate companies' reports are always higher than actuality for this reason 2. As the saying goes, 6 1/2% of nothing is still nothing. Compare this to the actual dollar amount of increases elsewhere and you'll see what I mean. 3. Finally, that combined average rent for studio, one, and two bedrooms seems rather low to me compared to what I've actually seen and rented out in the past month. It must be weighted more towards the studio and one bedroom end of the spectrum - I always prefer a median to an average for this reason.