November Marks One-Year Anniversary of FARE Act

12 November 2025

One year ago, the City Council upended how apartments are rented in New York City.

On November 13, 2024, the Council approved the Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses (FARE) Act, a measure that banned forcing tenants to pay fees for rental brokers they did not hire.

The bill’s approval was the culmination of years of efforts to reform a system that often cost tenants thousands of extra dollars to secure an apartment. Proponents of the FARE Act argued that this dynamic gave landlords more leverage to raise rents at lease renewal, knowing that tenants likely wanted to avoid those upfront costs.

Opponents, including the Real Estate Board of New York, have blamed the law for rising rents and the disappearance of public listings, as owners push the cost of broker fees to tenants and try to avoid the appearance of hiring a broker. The group is awaiting a federal appeals court decision on its legal challenge to the law.

This week marks one year since the bill’s passage, and five months since the law went into effect.

Here’s how the law has played out so far:

Listing Volume

Despite the industry’s outcry over the law, the consequences haven’t been as clear-cut as some predicted.

Within 24 hours of its adoption, more than 1,000 listings dropped from StreetEasy, as agents and landlords scrambled to rewrite contracts and revise their listings to comply with the new rules.

But a month later, the platform published a report stating that the drastic dip was short-lived. By the end of June, daily inventory on the site had increased more than 4 percent since the beginning of the month, an uptick that was only slightly lower than the change during the same time period last year.

Still, rental listings on the portal declined annually for each month since the FARE Act passed, according to data from StreetEasy. Inventory fell 6 percent in July, 8 percent in August, 6 percent in September and 7 percent in October.

However, the decreases in inventory are likely the result of multiple factors, not just the new law.

“While the FARE Act may have had some impact, the combination of low supply and high demand is what is primarily driving these trends that we have seen at play for several years,” said StreetEasy senior economist Kenny Lee.

Competition for apartments has been increasing for the last two years, Lee added, as more companies called their employees back to work and higher mortgage rates kept some potential home buyers in the rental market.

But on REBNY’s residential listing service, the declines following the FARE Act are more pronounced. Data from the trade group shows inventory dropped 12 percent year-over-year in June, followed by declines of 16 percent, 20 percent, 23 percent and 32 percent in each of the months after.

Last October, more than 2,000 listings for apartments in Manhattan hit the RLS, but last month, that number dropped to less than 500, according to UrbanDigs co-founder John Walkup.

“I don’t know where that volume is going,” said Walkup. “They’re still being listed for rent somewhere, somehow,” he added, referring to other listing websites.

Walkup added that the decline is likely more pronounced because the RLS only captures properties marketed by agents with exclusive agreements with landlords, which are likely in shorter supply now that landlords are responsible for paying them. As a result, the apartments available on the RLS skew toward the higher end of the rental market, where landlords are better able to absorb the cost of hiring an agent bc of the rent charge.

But both factors have made it tough for someone like Walkup, whose company relies on data from the RLS, to make heads or tails of the rental market.

“As well-intended as [the law] was, it has thrown a lot of confusion into the ranks,” Walkup said. “I can’t tell you if it’s cheaper to rent an apartment, but I can tell you that if you’re renting an apartment in Manhattan . . . the face values are a lot higher than they were a year ago.”

Following the passage of the FARE Act, median rents rose, though not dramatically, on a month-to-month basis, according to an analysis of StreetEasy data by The Real Deal. In June 2025, the median rent for listings on the listing platform was $4,000, a 2.6 percent increase from the previous month and a 5.2 percent jump year over year. The rate increased another .7 percent in July, representing a 6 percent increase from the previous year.

The median rate stayed flat the next month and decreased .8 percent in September (still 7.2 percent higher than September 2024) and dropped another 1.1 percent in October. At $3,950, the median rent in October 2025 was 8.2 percent higher than the same month last year.

“With vacancy rates expected to stay low, the pace of rent growth will stay elevated this year and next,” said StreetEasy’s Lee.

Brokerage business

While the debate over how the FARE Act will impact renters’ wallets continues, it has become clear that the pie has gotten smaller for brokerages and agents.

“A lot of the open listing, tenant rep agents, their business has really suffered as a result of the FARE Act,” Living New York co-founder Devin Someck said. Open listings, in which multiple brokerages were signed up to show the same rental unit, often came with the tenant covering the broker’s fee, a practice prohibited under the FARE Act.

Someck, whose firm works as both a landlord rep and property manager, said that he’s seen a swell of agents “seeking a kind of refuge” at this firm because of its strong landlord relationships.

He said his portfolio, which used to be split between listings where the owner pays and the tenant pays, now falls entirely under the owner pays category due to the law. He added that he’s seen larger shops pull back from the leasing business as profit margins have narrowed as a result of landlords scaling back their commission payments.

At the same time, leasing agents have also seen their commission volumes suffer as landlords more aggressively pursue renewals rather than pay out broker fees, according to Someck.

Jennifer Nobis, an agent with Bond New York, said that she still has landlord clients who are holding units off the market, unsure if they will try to rent out the apartments themselves or sell instead.

“For smaller landlords, the margin isn’t there,” she said.

That applies doubly to rent-stabilized units, which have already been struggling after the passage of the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act took away many of the levers landlords could pull to increase rents in their rent-stabilized properties, according to Bohemia Realty CEO Sarah Saltzberg.

“The owners that are losing money across the board on this asset type are certainly not looking to spend money that they don’t have to,” she said. “So if they can save a one-month broker fee, they will, and they’ll just say, ‘Find a way to get me a tenant another way.’ ”

Saltzberg says that she had already shifted her brokerage business away from rent-stabilized properties after 2019, but that the FARE Act further drove her to focus on exclusive landlord relationships.

“Any open listings that we worked on, or limited listings, it’s almost impossible to service those listings, because how do you let people know about them,” Saltzberg said.

It has also meant that she can’t use her shop as a training ground for up-and-coming agents who used to be able to cut their teeth on open listings, admitting that her firm has gotten smaller as she’s reoriented hiring towards experienced agents that can maintain valuable landlord connections.

“The old rule used to be, you’d have 20 percent of your agents making 80 percent of the revenue,” Saltzberg said. “Now we have a smaller team, but almost every single person is making real money.”

Legal fight

REBNY wasted no time filing a legal challenge to the FARE Act.

One month after its passage, the trade group filed a lawsuit in federal court, alleging, among other things, that the law violates the First Amendment rights of brokers and landlords because it discourages the publishing of rental listings. Under the FARE Act, a broker who advertises a rental is assumed to have been hired by the landlord.

The city, which is the target of the lawsuit, maintains that the law doesn’t “bar the publication of anything by anyone,” but sets ground rules for listings published with the blessing of a landlord.

Just one day before the law went into effect, Judge Ronnie Abrams delivered a major blow to the group: Not only did she refuse to pause the new rules, but she dismissed a majority of REBNY’s claims.

She threw out the First Amendment claim and another that the FARE Act is preempted by state law. REBNY’s allegation that the law defies the Contract Clause survived, though Abrams cast doubt on the claim outweighing the law’s “significant and legitimate public purpose.”

Abrams also denied REBNY’s subsequent request to halt the law while it pursued an appeal.

REBNY appealed to the Second Circuit, which also rejected its request to pause the FARE Act. The group is waiting for a decision on its appeal of Abrams’ dismissal of the First Amendment claim.

In court filings, the city has argued that reversing the law at this point would “create chaos.”

REBNY has long held that the law is bad for both brokers and tenants. For the latter, the group has warned that the law would result in fewer public listings and drive up rents.

“The longer this law is in effect, the longer consumers and owners are going to be adversely affected,” said Carl Hum, vice president and general counsel at REBNY.

Hum said brokers are still navigating the law’s gray areas, including what constitutes conditioning rental of a unit on hiring a broker, which is barred under the FARE Act. Dual agency — where a broker represents a tenant and a landlord — is still permitted, but a broker can’t publish a listing on behalf of a landlord and then collect a fee from the tenant who leases the apartment advertised.

What’s next

If the Second Circuit upholds the lower court’s dismissal of REBNY’s claims, the trade group could petition the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the case. The country’s highest court receives, on average, between 7,000 and 8,000 petitions each year but only hears about 80 cases.

The group could also seek legislative changes, though it seems unlikely that there would be much appetite to do so under the City Council or new mayoral administration.

Brooklyn Council member Chi Ossé, the FARE Act’s lead sponsor, isn’t concerned about the case.

“They already lost when we passed this law, and they’ve lost in court at every turn since,” Ossé said in an email. “We’ve beaten them once, and we’ll beat them again.”

He said the FARE Act shifted power back to tenants when negotiating lease renewals with their landlord. Tenants typically paid 15 percent of the annual cost of rent to the broker, adding thousands of dollars to the cost of moving.

“Before the FARE Act, tenants at lease renewal faced two options: stay and swallow the new rent or leave and take a huge hit in upfront costs,” he said. “With the end of forced broker fees, bargaining power is now in the hands of tenants at renewal, and that shift will put downward pressure on rents across the city.”

Ossé said he’s confident that Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will help strengthen the law and ramp up enforcement. The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection has received 1,125 complaints since June 11, according to Brick Underground. Ossé said that most of these complaints didn’t include enough information for city officials to take action and believes the City Council could help educate tenants about what kind of evidence they need to present to pursue claims.

“Our job is to help them turn those reports into actual results so every landlord and broker who breaks the law is held fully accountable,” he said.