For those needing an extra helping hand with the, often daunting, process of finding a rental unit in New York City, here’s a map to consider. It doesn’t only show you what neighborhood to go to in order to find the most rental units, but the colors can help you envisage the landscape in terms of building sizes. If you’re taking a quick look, the darker the color on the map, the more units the building has.

NYC Rental Units

The news is great for those looking to rent in Manhattan. Upper East Side, Washington Heights, and Upper West Side top our list of NYC neighborhoods with the highest numbers of residential units. With regard to prices, a recent Prudential Elliman report highlights that for Q1 2012, the median rent price for East Side was $2,850, while West Side was flying higher at $3,219. According to the same report, uptown rentals (Washington Heights, East Harlem) reached an average price of $1,700 in Q1 2012.

Manhattan would have had a monopoly of the first five places if it hadn’t been for Brooklyn to step in at number 5 with Crown Heights. With a little more than 35,000 rental units, Crown Heights was considered a rather affordable Brooklyn neighborhood until 2011, when it saw the highest increase in average rental prices for this borough. Another hot neighborhood of Brooklyn apartments for rent making it into our top ten is Bedford Stuyvesant at number 7, a region targeted mostly by artists and young renters.

Neighborhoods in the Bronx (Bronxwood and Morris Heights) and Queens (Astoria) ranked last in our top, with around 25,000 rental units in each neighborhood.

And for the missing names, here are all ten neighborhoods and the number of buildings and rental units allotted to each of them:

Roxana Baiceanu

Roxana Baiceanu

Roxana is an associate editor with Multi-Housing News and Commercial Property Executive. In the past, she also created content for PropertyShark and Point2Homes’ blog pages. She also has 5 years of experience as a marketing copywriter.