Quote:Three-bedrooms have long been hard to find, says Julie Rhinehart, of Corcoran, but in the past Brooklyn buyers would go from a two-bedroom to a townhouse. Now townhouses trade for $2.5 million and up (and that’s a gut renovation in most neighborhoods), and a nicely renovated place in Park Slope goes for $7 million or more. One of Rhinehart’s clients got fed up with losing out in six- and seven-person bidding wars for three-bedrooms and thought they’d solved their problem by finding a $1.7 million townhouse in Prospect Heights that needed a total gut reno. “They were so excited. They were like, ‘We can get this house,’” she says. The house got 26 offers in one week.

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The lack of three-beds is also at least partially an affordable-housing issue — as high rents continue to make living alone prohibitively expensive for many, single people opt for shares, and together, with three incomes, are able to pay more than a lot of families can manage. Affordable-housing advocates, meanwhile, frequently complain that housing lotteries mostly offer studios and one-beds, which are cheaper for developers to build, rather than larger apartments (and the larger apartments that do get built are almost always two-beds, never threes). A Gothamist analysis found that 70 percent of the affordable apartments built under Mayor Eric Adams were studios and one-beds.

So the market-rate three-bed is out of reach and the affordable one essentially nonexistent. In Manhattan, the average three-bedroom rental price was $8,737 in March, according to Douglas Elliman. In Brooklyn, it was $4,818, although a StreetEasy search in that price point pulled up a lot of divvied-up older apartments in neighborhoods like East Flatbush and East New York and basement-level duplexes in Gravesend and Bensonhurst. The more alluring stuff, in prime brownstone neighborhoods close to transit and in-demand school districts, tends to go for significantly more: a Cobble Hill brownstone duplex three-bedroom posted on a local listserve, for example, is asking $11,500 a month for a summer sublet. “The $5,000-to-$7,000-a-month price point? Oh there’s nothing,” says one Manhattan broker.