Joshua “Josh” Weisfeld is an accomplished real estate manager based in New York City. An asset manager with W Brothers Realty, LLC, Joshua Weisfeld develops and leases commercial assets including multifamily apartment complexes.
Apartment sizes in the United States are getting smaller. A report by RentCafe showed that, in 2022, the average size of new apartments was 887 square feet, a decrease of 30 square feet from the average size in 2021 of 857 square feet. This was the largest single year drop in a decade. One of the reasons for this big decline was an increase in the number of studios and one-bedroom apartments that entered the market in 2022, accounting for 57 percent of new units.
The average sizes of apartment types in 2022 also fell. The average size of studios fell to 464 square feet in 2022 from 477 square feet in 2021. The average size of a one-bedroom unit in 2022 was 727 square feet, down 12 square feet from 2021, and that of a two-bedroom unit was 1,097 square feet, also down 12 square feet from 2021.
Tallahassee, Florida, was the city with the largest average new apartment size in 2022 at 1,182 square feet, while Seattle, Washington, had the smallest new average apartment size at 659 square feet. Three New York City boroughs ranked among the top five cities for smallest new apartment units in the country. They were Queens with 681 square feet, Brooklyn with 692 square feet, and Manhattan with 740 square feet.
