You probably know there’s a ban on short-term rentals in New York — unless you’re rich.
Recently, a penthouse atop Trump Park Avenue rented for a record sum to a certain jet-setting sultan. Complete with a library, a formal dining room and a woodburning fireplace, the furnished five-bedroom aerie went for $52,500 for the month — the minimum stay under New York City law.
Still, the renter, an unnamable public figure of Middle Eastern origin, made certain changes.
“They didn’t want to sleep on a bed that anyone else had slept on,” Lisa Simonsen of Brown Harris Stevens, who handled that deal, told The Post. “They didn’t want anyone to touch their sheets. They didn’t want anyone’s shoes in their space. They didn’t want contamination of any sort and even fragrances could not be worn in the home. We had a new bed brought in, but they brought their own bedding and left it there.”
The purpose of their meticulous stay in this nine-room perch, steps from the ultra-luxury retailers of Fifth Avenue?
“They only came for two or three days of shopping,” said Simonsen.
Since New York began enforcing regulations that act as a de facto ban on all short-term, Airbnb-style rentals in 2023 — setting the minimum stay at 30 days — the practice of renting a luxury apartment for a full month, only to use for a matter of days, has become relatively commonplace in the city, brokers said. It makes some financial sense, too — for those who use caviar for toothpaste.
“Now, prices for hotels have gotten so crazy that to get a suite at one of the better hotels in the city is running north of $2,000 a night,” said Abby Palanca of Serhant, who is currently marketing a three-bedroom, $15,000-per-month apartment at 96 King St. — short stays welcome, as long as your take it for the month.
She explained that if you are also booking additional rooms for family and staff — or taking an entire floor so that you can enforce your sanitary standards, or other niche preferences — you are easily looking at tens of thousands of bucks per night in a city hotel. At press time, a weekend stay in a basic suite over a weekend in February starts at $2,650 per night at Aman New York; $1,918 per night at The Surrey; $2,095 per night at The Fifth Avenue Hotel; and $1,662 at the Plaza. That’s before taxes and fees.
“We had a wealthy businessman from Texas, who was coming to the city once or twice a month,” said Palanca. “He really hated carrying a suitcase and wanted to be able to pit stop in the city whenever it suited him. So he rented a barely furnished apartment for $13,000 a month in Soho so that he didn’t have to deal with rising prices in hotels. He was using it no more than three to four days a month.”
Under this arrangement, the lucky Longhorn could keep his toothbrush in the bathroom, and his suits pressed and waiting in the closet.
“High-net-worth individuals love the flexibility of being able to pop in whenever they want,” added Palanca.
Renting out a home for the month for the purposes of a short trip is now big business for Airbnb and its higher-end alternatives in New York. And masters of the universe are particularly guilty of booking up long-term homes for short-term use in city neighborhoods where five-star hotels are not an option to begin with.
“Especially in the West Village and Brooklyn, there’s not a lot of nice hotels,” said Jonah Hanig, the CEO of Rove, a marketplace for luxury rentals in New York City, the Hamptons and South Florida that offers concierge service to renters. Many of Rove’s top properties are in Brooklyn neighborhoods like Prospect Heights and Boerum Hill, or Manhattan microcosms like Tribeca and Greenwich Village.
“Let’s say you have three kids and a nanny, that’s four hotel rooms, which makes it really uneconomical really quickly for a one-week stay. That’s $8,000 a night, when you could rent a four-bedroom luxury apartment for $30,000 — the same cost as four nights in a hotel.”
The reasons for renting short-term, instead of reserving rooms in those ever-pricey hotels, are plentiful and eccentric.
One of Palanca’s clients has a rental in Brooklyn that’s booked by a divorced dad.
“He comes into town twice a month to spend time with his daughter, but rents the apartment in two- or three-month increments,” she said. “He likes the security of knowing he has a place and he doesn’t want to stay in a hotel.”
Hanig said Rove’s clients book this way for varied reasons: “Sometimes it’s a New York resident doing a home renovation, or someone who had a pipe burst. Sometimes it’s a divorce or a medical procedure. Sometimes it is for filming or a Broadway production. And obviously it’s a lot of people traveling to New York.”
For instance, Hanig said, when a “Latin pop star” came to the city, they rented a $25,000-a-month Rove pad, but only stayed six nights.
Still they are all largely driven by the same priority, he said: privacy.
“We get it all the time,” said Hanig, noting that their clients include NFL and NBA stars, as well as celebrities, who might be jetting in and out of the city for the Met Gala but booking for the month. “An assistant calls and says, ‘so and so is looking. They need a drive-in, drive-out garage. They don’t want to walk through a lobby. They need to be able to accommodate security and their head of security needs to tour before they book.’”
Common concerns are: How many people staff the building? Is there a concierge 24 hours a day? How many doormen are there? Is there an elevator person? Where are the cameras in the building? And are there cameras in the parking garage?
At the Trump Park Avenue penthouse — now on the market for $9.95 million — Simonsen said that her client vetted their lodging inside and out before checking in.
“They came with a staff of five or six to make sure that everything was more than impeccable even though it was a triple-mint apartment,” she said.
