NYC Rentals After the FARE Act: One Year of Data

Among 14,764 NYC apartments listed before the FARE Act and again in 2026, median asking rent rose 8.0% for apartments that previously carried a tenant-paid fee, versus 3.7% for apartments already advertised without one.

That 4.3 percentage point gap is the central finding in RentReboot's one-year analysis. It does not prove the law caused the full difference, but it shows that formerly fee-bearing apartments came back at meaningfully higher asking rents than comparable units in the matched sample.

The Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses Act took effect on June 11, 2025. A broker hired by a landlord can no longer bill the tenant for the broker fee, and any other fee a tenant must pay has to be disclosed in the listing and rental agreement. One year later, broker-fee demands have nearly vanished from public listing descriptions, while fewer stabilized buildings are appearing publicly and more listings are itemizing other mandatory fees.

RentReboot analyzed 2.3 million New York City rental listings, covering about 805,000 distinct units across more than 20 platforms. We compared the same apartments before and after the law, tracked stabilized buildings against state records, read fee language in 183,178 descriptions, and followed how listings ended.

Bloomberg cited RentReboot listing data in its reporting on brokers charging renters to access hidden inventory. This analysis publishes the broader evidence behind that shift and the limits that matter before assigning cause.

The fee left the listing copy

In June and July 2024, 2.2% of the StreetEasy descriptions we scanned demanded a broker fee. In the same months of 2026, that share was 0.06%. The public language changed almost completely.

At the same time, listings that itemized another required non-rent fee rose from 0.7% to 6.7%. That does not mean those fees were newly invented. The FARE Act also requires remaining tenant-paid fees to be disclosed clearly, so part of the increase is disclosure turning on.

The city's rule is straightforward: a broker representing the landlord, including a listing agent, cannot charge the tenant a broker fee. Landlords and their agents must also disclose the other fees a tenant must pay in the listing and rental agreement.

The same apartments came back at different rents

We matched each apartment's last StreetEasy listing before June 11, 2025, to its first 2026 relisting through July 31. The five-borough sample contains 14,764 apartments.

Among the 4,763 apartments that previously carried a tenant-paid fee, the median asking rent rose 8.0%. Among the 10,001 apartments already advertised without a fee, the median increase was 3.7%. The gap was widest in Manhattan at 4.3 percentage points, followed by Brooklyn at 2.8 points and Queens at 1.9 points.

Do not read the gap as proven pass-through. This is an association measured among apartments that relisted. Fee-bearing stock differs from no-fee stock, and the analysis does not control for every difference. The 4.3-point gap is a ceiling on possible fee pass-through, not proof that the law caused the full gap or that every old fee moved into rent.

The renter math still matters. Avoiding an upfront fee of about $6,000 while paying the higher monthly rent implied by the measured gap would take about five years to break even. The median tenancy behind these listings is roughly 27 months. On that arithmetic, a renter moving on the median schedule remains ahead.

Fewer stabilized buildings showed up in public

Holding both the platform and calendar window constant, StreetEasy carried 9,830 rent-stabilized buildings from May through July 2025 and 9,018 in the same period of 2026. That is a decline of 8.3%.

Distinct units listed in stabilized buildings fell 4.7%, while listings in buildings not on the stabilization rolls rose 1.6%. The comparison is useful because it holds the source and season constant instead of confusing RentReboot's expanding coverage with a market change.

The decline was broad. Among ZIP codes with enough listings to compare, lit stabilized buildings fell 29% in Astoria's 11102, 23% in Prospect Heights, 21% in Park Slope and Washington Heights, and 17% on the Lower East Side.

This does not say every missing apartment moved into a private channel. A listing can disappear because an owner found a tenant elsewhere, withdrew the unit, changed platforms, or never had a genuine vacancy. It says something narrower: fewer stabilized buildings were visible on the same public platform in the same rental season.

The unseen market was already much larger

Of the 47,601 registered rent-stabilized buildings RentReboot can place on the map, 50.4% have no matched listing anywhere in the archive. The share ranges from 20.7% in Manhattan to 89.4% in the Bronx.

That borough gradient is meaningful, but the absolute shares need care. Address matching creates false negatives. Small landlords advertise in places no platform indexes. Listings that predate our coverage are invisible. The figures are an upper bound on how much housing never reaches a public listing, not proof that each building never advertised.

The visible slice is also selective. In pooled 2026 samples, listings in stabilized buildings carried a median asking rent of $3,895, statistically similar to the $3,795 median elsewhere. The city's 2023 Housing and Vacancy Survey reported a $1,500 median contract rent for sitting rent-stabilized tenants.

Those figures measure different things: a new asking rent and an existing tenant's contract rent. The gap is still useful because it shows why the public market can mislead renters about the affordable stock that exists.

More listings ended without a confirmed close

In the year before the FARE Act, 24.9% of listings that ended were pulled with no confirmed close in our data. In the first year of the law, the share was 29.2%. The increase was sharpest in peak season: 21%-22% in June and July 2024 versus 32%-33% in June and July 2025.

A pulled listing is not automatically a bait listing. It may have rented without the close being reported, been withdrawn, or been posted to gather leads. Listing data cannot separate those outcomes. It can show that the public record now confirms fewer closes.

What remained public got hotter

The share of listings taking a price cut fell from 18% in January 2025 to 10% in January 2026 and 9.4% in February. Median June asking rent in the StreetEasy samples rose from $3,700 in 2024 to $3,999 in 2026.

The public market was already trading up before the law. The share of new listings asking under $2,500 fell from 28.8% in early 2022 to 8.6% in 2026, while the share asking $6,000 or more rose from 8.3% to 19.1%.

Most of that four-year change predates the FARE Act and should not be attributed to it. It is the backdrop that makes any further loss of visible inventory matter.

What this analysis cannot see

• Signed lease prices: every rent figure here is an asking price.
• Broker or landlord intent: listing records do not say why an apartment disappeared.
• Private inventory: building websites, word of mouth, supers, and closed broker networks can be invisible.
• Perfect outcomes: closes are reported late and unevenly.
• Raw cross-year platform volume: RentReboot's source coverage changed, so comparisons hold the platform and season constant.

Those limits are not footnotes to hide. They are the boundary between a useful market signal and a causal claim the data cannot support.

Sources and methodology

• NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection: FARE Act FAQ
• Bloomberg: NYC Brokers Are Charging Renters $4,000 to View Hidden Listings
• 2023 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey: selected initial findings
• NYS Homes and Community Renewal: rent registration

The analysis covers listings through July 2026. All figures were computed on the August 6, 2026 snapshot of the RentReboot archive. Aggregate statistics may be attributed to RentReboot Research. Underlying listing records are not republished.

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