The new rent law makes it harder for international students seeking to rent a property in New York. As the apartment owners, are unable to charge security not more than the rent of 1 month. It is making it harder for the International Students enrolled in an institution like NYU and Columbia to rent the property for the long-term.
According to Adam Frisch managing principal at residential brokerage Lee & Associates Residential NYC said, the tenant advocates tried their best to make housing in New York affordable to many, but now they have made it difficult for international students to rent a property. He further added that now it is illegal in the state of New York to take more than one month of rent as security.
Frisch said, we will face a crisis of international students, nobody will rent to them because they don’t have social security numbers.
It means only those international students who don’t work part-time at the campus are going to face difficulties while renting a property in NYC.
It is because the US government recognizes and assigns employed international student’s social security numbers to track their earnings over the period of their stay in the US. It excludes those who have F-2 unemployed status, which means they aren’t working in the US.

According to Columbia University’s website, they are expecting at least 14,000 international students this year. The majority of them will have to go to housing not managed by the University even when University is the largest property owner in the city with a 14 million square feet area of Manhattan’s Morning Heights neighborhood.
A spokesperson from Columbia’s off-campus housing association said, that they have not seen any visible impact of this law on international students and they didn’t even receive any inquiries from students. He further added that nothing in this law stops international students to pay months of rent in advance. He also told us that the international students are now accustomed to paying rent of one year in advance.
Samantha Lu, the associate director of students at University denied the fact that they are receiving an influx of calls from international students desperate for apartments and houses.
The main reason for that is the apps and the companies looking for new opportunities to capitalize on the gaps present in the market. One of them is TheGuarantors, an app that acts as an agent between the international student who isn’t employed or doesn’t meet the leasing requirements. It is even mentioned on Columbia’s Off-Campus Housing Association website.
According to the company’s COO, Joe Ben Zvi, it provides landlords with a guarantee on behalf of students for a fee.
He further added that the students pay whatever the risk model determines, and it is different for every student. Application has received 15-million-dollars funding in its series B funding. Since the rent law is changed, it increased its userbase since then, and it is expected to grow more in the future.