Upper West Side Still Tops Among NY Apartment Seekers
Online searches are now SOP for anyone looking for a rental apartment or a for-sale condo, and according to digital marketing firm Knightsbridge Park, online search patterns offer clues to the state of a market.
By Dees Stribling, Contributing Editor
New York—Online searches are now SOP for anyone looking for a rental apartment or a for-sale condo, and according to digital marketing firm Knightsbridge Park, online search patterns offer clues to the state of a market. In particular, the company specializes in New York City, where it says that the Upper West Side ranks as the top-searched Manhattan neighborhood for apartments over the last 12 months.
Knightsbridge Park reports that while downtown Manhattan neighborhoods may have more cultural cachet, it’s an old Uptown stalwart that dominates Google searches (within web traffic originating from within New York City). Namely, at the top is “Upper West Side apartments.” Number two is “Upper East Side apartments.”
Perhaps as an indication of a mini-boom in Wall Street, “Financial District apartments” was the third-most popular search over the last 12 months, with roughly half the traffic of “Upper West Side apartments.”
Close behind are the East and West Village, which—despite their different reputations and appeal—are roughly on par. While “Midtown apartments” lags significantly behind, with fewer than one-tenth the queries of “East Village apartments,” the arguably fresher “Murray Hill apartments” is pulling the same level of inquiry as the two Village neighborhoods.
Brooklyn experienced a slightly downward trend in searches, at least in the condo market, Knightsbridge Park also says. Searches for “Manhattan condos” remained essentially unchanged, dipping only about 1 percent compared to last year. On the other hand, “Brooklyn condos” searches have decreased almost 7 percent, a statistically significant drop.
Looking at searches within New York City, apartment hunters specifying a number of bedrooms broke down as follows: 43 percent were looking for one-bedroom apartments; 28 percent were looking for two bedrooms; and 25 percent were looking for three bedrooms. Only 4 percent were looking for four or more bedrooms.
New Yorkers aren’t the only ones searching for information about New York residential properties. Traffic to Knightsbridge Park project websites originating in Russia, for instance, didn’t drop in the first quarter of 2014, despite of recent political developments in that country.
