By SARAH KERSHAW from The New York Times.

NEW YORK is a city of renters — about 75 percent, in fact. And lately, that includes more of the super-rich and the merely wealthy, as rentals of $10,000 to $100,000 per month are on the rise.  That is at least partly because sales in the New York City luxury market, the niche that has been slowest to recover from the housing crash, are unpredictable: some sellers are getting close to their asking prices; others are swallowing huge discounts. Still others are sitting on their properties and banking on a full market comeback.

At the highest end of the rental market, defined as apartments renting for $10,000 a month or more, the 200 new leases signed in the third quarter amounted to more than double the number at the same time in 2009 — a year in which both sales and rentals in the luxury market were extremely sluggish, according to Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel and a partner at Condominium Recovery, which invests in real estate.

While the pace of sales for apartments costing $10 million or more has remained largely flat, Mr. Miller’s data shows a huge jump and a steady rise in the number of $10,000 and $15,000 rentals, particularly in the first three quarters. Landlords are also securing rents much closer to what they have been asking. Discounts are hovering around 4 percent now, compared with about 20 percent a year ago, he said.

For sellers, said Shaun Osher, the chief executive of the CORE Marketing Group, a real estate brokerage firm, the decision to rent out their properties is “a hedge on the market.”

“When it came time to quantify the value of renting for a long period and waiting for a market recovery,” Mr. Osher said, “it made sense to a lot more people who don’t need the liquidity to hold the property and keep it as a rental.”  Read full article here.