The only consideration for you should be:

1. what do you care about more space or views?

2. which station do you like more? Grove Street or the combo of Newport + exchange place.

As far as I can tell, iron state manages both buildings and they do a good job with most of their properties in Hoboken and jersey city. They always have insanely low available inventory because they are pricing intentionally at market as opposed to above market.

Bad natural lighting but everything else is nice

There's an extremely mild cold going around that could be it

Yes agree 10% appears to be the norm this year. Still will rant about it. We need to build 10x the housing each year so it depreciates like Tokyos does.

1BR From 3400-> $3800 per month. Doorman building near exchange place/ Grove Street/ Newport PATH general area.

My partner wants a doorman building due to sense of safety so I'm stuck with these crazy high rise rents.

I dream of ~3 years ago when a 3 BR 2BA I split with roommates in the best location in a subway rich area of NYC was nearly the same price all in ($4300 total now it's going for $6k last I checked).

Alas this is how capitalism works. You squeeze and get higher margins anywhere you can.

Interest rates were the other huge driver. Many other portfolio buildings for these owners are commercial properties on floating rate debt that they are deeply underwater on. So they're probably trying to make up for it where they can.

If you could charge more for a product you sell, wouldn't you?

I moved to the NJ side of the Hudson specifically because my income became high enough that the ~4% city tax for NYC became a non trivial amount of money. I suspect many others did the same especially during covid when no one has to commute into the office. This gentrification effect is now at the snowballing phase for Jersey City where soon our rents east of Grove Street will rival the West Village in NYC.

Over a 30 year period "luxury" apartments should start trickling down to more affordable prices as new luxury buildings overtake them. But the NYC area is so insane that you can have old buildings like Grove Pointe continue to charge rents comparable to new builds in the area.

My biggest regret financially for rent was not buying property in Q3 2020 when prices were down (became a digital nomad instead since I thought NYC would become a crime and germ filled cesspool there was a really nice 1BR in Brooklyn that has now gone up 20%) or signing a longer term lease in Q1 2021 when rental market was still soft.

Reason is moving costs. They know moving costs money, so if they are able to raise rent just enough to be competitive with moving costs, most people will stay put. Also yieldstar software is definitely leading to collusion in jersey city + Hoboken in particular.

The fact that you can type this without being worried about being arrested in the USA.... Means it's probably freer than most countries

It's unfortunate but if you go 4 blocks west of Grove, on Newark the area starts looking noticeably more run down.

I kinda regret not getting a $1700 one bedroom walkup within a 8 minute walk of Grove Street during covid. Instead I went for something close to double the price 2 years later in one of the newer high rises in the NYC area. But I forget to lock my door all the time so the peace of mind is worth it l.