Woman divulges secret way to find rare rent-stabilized NYC apartments and its not for the faint of heart: I was exhausted

A New York City renter has gone viral after revealing the painstaking strategy she used to score a two-bedroom stabilized apartment in Central Brooklyn — for a sweet $1,680 per month.But Alexandra Dye’s incredibly hustle-heavy method, laid out in a TikTok video that has racked up more than 335,000 views, is not for the faint of heart. It requires digging through expired listings on StreetEasy, cold-emailing brokers in bulk and accepting a brutal rejection rate that would discourage most apartment hunters before they got started.The technique hinges on a little-known StreetEasy search function.Dye, 29, instructs hopeful renters to input their preferred neighborhoods, bedroom count and budget under the Rentals filter, then scroll to the Keywords field and type “rent-stabilized.” The twist: switching the listing status to “Rented” before hitting search.

That change surfaces a trove of previously rented stabilized units that never would have appeared in a standard search.From there, renters are told to contact the brokers attached to those old listings directly, pitching themselves with a detailed template that includes income, budget, pet situation and desired neighborhoods — essentially handing brokers everything they need to match a tenant on the spot.“I got maybe one response per 15 to 20 messages I sent,” Dye says in the video.“That’s fine.

The goal is to just find a couple of the right contacts that you’re looking for.”The logic behind the workaround is rooted in how the rent-stabilized market actually operates.Units rarely hit public listings because brokers and landlords already have warm pipelines of interested renters.

Dye’s method is essentially a way to force yourself into that pipeline from the outside.“They are really often not listed at all,” she explains.“If a broker has a rent-stabilized unit, they don’t even have to list it because they know people already who are interested.

You want to be one of those people....