Residential Real Estate

For the most part Manhattan remains a brutal market for renters this month, especially if you’re set on living below 23rd Street. But economic uncertainty has brought bargains (in the New York sense of the word) to some neighborhoods in the middle of a season when rents usually peak, according to the June rental report (PDF) released today by The Real Estate Group New York.

The good news is you can still find a market-rate apartment for less than $2,000 a month on the island of Manhattan, if you’re willing to live without a doorman in the borough's sleepier neighborhoods.

Average June rents for non-doorman studios were below $2,000 on the Upper East Side ($1,831), the Upper West Side ($1,968), Harlem ($1,287), and Midtown West ($1,984).  read more »

In an interview with New York magazine today, Rockstar Games mogul Dan Houser talks about his inspirations for the godly New York video game Grand Theft Auto IV: "You've got the angry sleeping-pill-popping sort of Sex and the City type woman, you know, whose looks are just beginning to fade ... The people in Soho are expensively dressed and into shopping and vacuous in their own way."  read more »

Finally, no more embarrassing calls from fairly well-employed thirty-somethings to their baffled parents in the sticks. "Dad, can you co-sign?"

Manhattan-based Insurent Agency Corporation announced Tuesday a new program to insure renters whose income levels do not meet the ridiculous 40- to 50-times-the-monthly-rent formula required by greedy landlords citywide.

The full details after the jump.  read more »

Downtown's swanky Bowery Hotel is looking for "an A-list actor, studio executive, oil sheik or titan of industry" to rent out its two-bedroom penthouses -- just $30,000 a month, according to an e-mail sent to The Observer.

That's only $6,000 more than late actor Heath Ledger's $24,000-a-month, three-bedroom SoHo loft.  read more »