NYC Rents Need To Fall Up To 15% Says Billionaire Real Estate Investor, Richard LeFrak

Billionaire real estate investor Richard LeFrak sat down with Bloomberg this morning and unloaded some rather disappointing predictions for New York real estate owners, namely that they should expect 10-15% rent reductions over the coming months/years. As we have several times as well, LeFrak said the pricing weakness will come courtesy of a massive oversupply of new apartment capacity which was built in anticipation of "incomes that don't exist in the market now."

"Rents are going to come down, I would say, 10-15%. They started to already.

Part of that is because we built a lot of new product at the high end...anticipating incomes that don't exist in the market now.

You can have a job in a hotel or the hospitality business and you can have a job in the financial services business. Those two jobs don't pay the same but they both count as a job.

So we need more affordable product in the market. There's huge demand in that price point.

But what we built, whether it's in New York or San Francisco, or some of the other over-served markets, will get absorbed because in the end, it's jobs."

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