At this point, few need to be told that Jersey City is a hot real estate market and cranes that dot the skyline drive that point home. While exact numbers for rental and condo values are hard to pin down, one development advisory company has released new statistics that shed some light on where the market is and may be headed.
The Marketing Directors is a Manhattan-based company with sales teams all across North America. The marketing firm’s specialty is strictly new developments, and they’ve leased up local developments like 70 Columbus, Trump Bay Street, Journal Squared, Crystal Point, and Vantage.
The company, which boasts over $30 billion in total sales, is selling condo units in Park and Shore and 99 Hudson, both currently under construction. They’ve crunched the numbers on last year’s trends for both Jersey City’s rental and condo markets.
According to their analysis, 2017 saw a total of 1,080 new luxury rental units added to the market. That growth was driven in large part by a few major rental high rises Downtown as well as Journal Squared. But interestingly, The Marketing Directors’ numbers show that even with the large increase in supply, average rents in Jersey City jumped up 7.9% over the year.
The report also looked at the average size of each market’s units. On the rental side, units in Jersey City tended to skew smaller, as one-bedroom apartments accounted for over 52% of the market.
As for condos, 2017 saw prices increase 9.3%, up an average of $51,915 to $609,050. Downtown’s neighborhoods had the most sales, as 55.6% of all Jersey City condo closings were for units east of I-78. Condos that closed in all of Jersey City tended to be bigger in size than the rental market; one-bedroom condos made up only 38% of the market, while two bedrooms accounted for nearly half the share of closings.
The Marketing Directors pulled data from publically available sources as well as the company’s own proprietary data. Regardless of the data source, the trends are apparent. Both the rental and condo markets are seeing rather steep upward trends. And while that’s great for owners and developers, it raises concerns about affordability for those without an ownership stake in the market. It also begs the question, how long can the market sustain this growth?
