NYC renters built a website to help them triumph over landlords trying to hide rent-stabilized apartments

• Some New York City landlords try to hide their rent-stabilized units to make more money.
• Two frustrated renters wanted to make the availability of stabilized units in NYC more transparent.
• Their new website, RentReboot, alerts users when rent-stabilized apartments are listed on the market.

In February 2024, Ilias Miraoui devised a plan to navigate the hellscape that is apartment hunting in New York City.

The 28-year-old data scientist would populate one browser tab with StreetEasy, the popular Zillow-owned site that has the most comprehensive collection of NYC rental listings. In another tab, Miraoui pulled up the city's official list of buildings with rent-stabilized apartments, which are often cheaper because their monthly rent increases have been capped since 1969.

The system worked. He scored a one-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment on the Lower East Side for $2,400 a month. Based on the rents of similar but market-rate units he toured, Miraoui estimates he's saved about $600 a month since he moved in.

This process should be easier for everyone, he thought. So Miraoui teamed up with software developer Adam Sebti, 30, to launch RentReboot, a new website that alerts users when buildings on the rent-stabilized list have new listings on StreetEasy.

"The idea is to show that information and make it more public," Sebti said. "So everyone can have a chance."

RentReboot users enter what they're looking for in an apartment, including budget, number of bedrooms, preferred neighborhoods, and building amenities like an elevator or doorman. They receive two emails or texts each day summarizing new listings that fit their criteria for free. For $12 a month, users can get real-time email alerts and three texts a day with their best matches. For $20 a month, users get unlimited texts and first access to any new tools.

The duo said they had 20,000 signups in the two weeks after launching the website in mid-April.

Rent-stabilized apartments can be hard to find

Renters see these diamond-in-the-rough apartments as a saving grace in one of the country's most expensive housing markets.

Citing recent city data, The New York Times reported in April that the typical monthly rent for a market-rate unit is around $2,000, but it's only $1,500 for a rent-stabilized unit.

In February, the median asking price for NYC rentals was $3,645, 2.6% more than the year before, according to StreetEasy. A committee approves annual increases for stabilized units, which can be a maximum of 2.75% on a one-year lease and 5.25% on a two-year lease.

Data from the City of New York shows that, as of 2023 — the most recent year with available data — there were about 2.3 million renter-occupied units in NYC. According to the Rent Guidelines Board, the group that sets and monitors rent increases for stabilized units, only about 1 million of those apartments are rent-stabilized.

For many New Yorkers, finding a rent-stabilized apartment is like discovering the Holy Grail — and just as difficult to secure.

In 2019, New York City repealed a former rule that allowed landlords to raise rents 20% on vacant units, aiming to curb soaring rents. Some housing-market analysts believe this has led certain landlords to keep their units off the market, hoping the rule will eventually return.

The Housing and Vacancy Survey, a report published every three years by the New York Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the US Census Bureau, shows that between January and June 2023, about 33,000 of the city's roughly 2.3 million apartments were vacant and available for rent.

The survey estimated that 26,310 rent-stabilized apartments were left vacant in that time period. While that is less than the 43,000 vacant units in the same survey in 2021, it is not much less than the 33,210 units of all housing that were for rent between January and July 2023.

Some renters have had success challenging landlords who have illegally charged them market-rate rent for what is actually a stabilized unit.

Last year, a New York City renter named Danielle, who declined to share her last name with BI for privacy reasons, reached a $150,000 settlement with her former landlord after discovering she was paying market-rate for a unit that was actually rent-stabilized.

"I already didn't kind of trust landlords, but I guess I had lived in this world where I assumed that people, for the most part, told the truth about stuff," she told Business Insider in 2024.

More features to help renters find rent-stabilized units are on the way

Units on RentReboot come from cross-checking addresses with the city's official list, but some are additionally flagged as verified if their StreetEasy profiles also mention their rent-stabilized status.

Miraoui and Sebti are working on ways to quickly verify a unit's rent-stabilized status with its broker, even if it's not explicitly mentioned in the listing.

They also plan to add additional features to the website using generative AI, like analyzing photos of windows in the listings to figure out which units have the most natural light.