Trump apartment rental prices lagging peer properties in NYC
It's no secret President Donald Trump is not popular in his native New York City -- he won just 10 percent of the vote in Manhattan in last November's election, after all. Indeed, Mr. Trump is so unpopular in the Big Apple that a new study suggests ultra-high-end apartments in local buildings bearing his name are underperforming the New York City real estate market, one of the most overheated in the world.
Apartments in Trump-branded buildings on average are taking longer to rent and requiring deeper price cuts when compared to units in similarly high-end buildings since the election, according to a study by the apartment-rental platform Zumper.
"I think rentals are pretty uniquely tied to public perception in real time, versus a condo sale is more of a drawn-out process," said Devin O'Brien, Zumper's director of strategic marketing, who studied real estate economics at the University of Cambridge and led the Trump apartments study. "If someone were to have a negative perception toward Trump, that would show up much quicker in the rental market."
Not all apartments in Trump buildings are underperforming the market: The ones at the lower end of the price spectrum (up to $4,000 per month -- remember, this is New York City) are renting up just as quickly as pre-election, the Zumper analysis found
"For New York it is still is a competitive market, and even if there's a potential stigma, good deals are going to be taken up quickly," said O'Brien, who noted Zumper gets listings from virtually every major landlord and broker in the city. The company has raised about $32 million in venture capital since 2012, according to Crunchbase, and employs about 100 people, including 21 in Brooklyn.
The Trump Organization did not respond to a request from CBS MoneyWatch to discuss the findings, which Zumper released on Friday.
The study looked at rental listings in seven Trump-branded buildings -- Trump Palace, Trump Parc, Trump Parc East, Trump Park Avenue, Trump Place, Trump Tower, and the Trump World Tower -- and compared them to listings in seven non-Trump buildings that are similar in age, location, price and amenities.
Zumper reviewed 377 rental listings between December 2015 and October 2017, bookending the election and considering the average time on market of each listing and any price change over the course of the listing.
The results: In five of the seven building pairs, the Trump properties fared worse in the post-election period when compared to the non-Trump buildings. One Trump building, the Trump Parc, performed better than its pairing (the JW Marriott Essex House), and the final building, Trump Place, performed about the same with its pairing.
O'Brien said he was not aware of any other firms studying the performance of Trump-branded rental units. But a pre-election study by the property listings website StreetEasy found that condo units in Trump-branded properties were growing in value at a slower rate than the city's other residential towers.
