This FirstMover Open Data Project aims to democratize NYC rental data and resources to renters and analysts.
The project started with two people moving to New York City who were completely stressed out by the apartment search. Beyond high rents, the sheer volume neighborhoods, rent guides, scam watches felt overwhelming. We ended up building FirstMover for ourselves- an app that sends you push notifications the moment a new listing goes live. In order for the app to work, we began collecting public listing data from public rental sites.
As the data collected each month, we started analyzing it. It occurred to us that other people might find this useful too. While StreetEasy offers aggregated market trends, nobody was publishing raw, individual listing-level data. The NYC rental market is more dynamic than ever, with skyrocketing rents and Mamdani's housing intentions. We figured people more talented than us could do something useful with the data. So, we built this site.
Why free?
FirstMover's key value proposition is speed- we're selling the moment a listing appears, so users can be the first to respond. Once our push notification fires and you've seen it, that specific data point is basically valueless to us as a business. But it's not valueless to the broader community. In the spirit of commodifying one's complements, we would love to bring more data nerds into the rental market space, see what they build, and go from there.
Further, we'd admittedly love to turn FirstMover into a lucrative side project. If we could get more eyeballs on our app by offering valuable, free data, we see that as a win-win.
What we're building
The Open Data page offers raw rental listing data. At the beginning of every month, we'll publish last month's data as a downloadable CSV. Every row is a listing as it first appeared on the market. We also hope to aggregate other datasets we come across. For example, the NYC Rent Guidelines Board publishes rent-stabilized building records as PDFs, so we cleaned that up and put it in a Google Sheet.
The Resources page offers helpful resources, mainly for renters. On the side, we're using our data to build stuff that we and our friends think is cool: interactive maps, monthly reports, a "find your neighborhood" quiz, and a "guess the rent" game. If you have ideas for resources, datasets, or tools that should exist here, reach out at firstmovernyc@gmail.com. The entire website is also open source on GitHub, so if you have something valuable to contribute, submit a PR!
A Note on AI
I should disclose that a large portion of this site is generated by AI. But none of the data is. All data is modeled directly from the source of truth and published in raw format on the Open Data page.