With a monthly budget of up to $1,300, a nice rental in Manhattan was unlikely, if perfectly doable in Queens.
In most states, that amount of money would buy a very nice rental property or even multiple properties.
Some of the apartment buildings and multifamily dwellings form a portfolio that his two sons, Philip, 33, and Maxwell, 24, will eventually inherit, along with a nice rental income.
If you owned a building directly and made some nice rental income, you'd owe tax on that even if you left the cash in the business checking account.
Still, there's lots of demand for nicer rentals — even at $2,000 or more a month for a one-bedroom — from young people with good jobs and no particular urgency to buy.
For some, practical upgrades — a nonstop flight, a nicer rental car — make all the difference.
IN Osterville on the south shore of Cape Cod, for example, Paul Grover, senior vice president of Kinlin Grover GMAC Real Estate, which has 14 offices on the Cape, said: "A nice oceanfront rental on a sandy beach could be $30,000 to $50,000 a month for July and August.
A nice-looking rental building was going up on East Second Street, but when Ms. Hickey visited, she found that studio apartments started at around $2,000.
Dee Kerrigan Perfido, a broker-owner of First Hampton International Realty in Westhampton Beach, said she had seen a "nice uptick" in rentals for the first time in three years.
"The conundrum was, I was not willing to have a mortgage on a place in Manhattan that was not as nice as the rental I was living in".
