Rent or Buy in New York? Compare the Costs

In Manhattan’s East Village, buying an apartment beats renting within four years. In the Soho area just a few blocks away, it would take 31 years before owning makes more financial sense.

That analysis of the so-called tipping point—the amount of time it would take for the cost of renting to equal or exceed the cost of buying a comparable home—is based on Bloomberg’s new exclusive, interactive map of real estate prices by neighborhood in Manhattan and Brooklyn, using fourth-quarter data from StreetEasy. The map, to be updated every three months, offers a view of areas with the biggest listing discounts, the greatest number of sales and the largest price increases—or decreases—from a year earlier, among other data points.