The fourth apartment Heather Maldonado tours in her YouTube video is a sleek Manhattan studio renting for $3,350 a month, with big windows but no standard stovetop or full-size fridge. The next, for $3,500, feels a little more New York, with crown molding and nine-foot ceilings, until a turn into the bathroom reveals what appears to be a rusty, leaking pipe.
Then there is the penthouse on the 22nd floor of a converted old hotel. Ms. Maldonado, 29, can be seen stepping onto gorgeous parquet hardwood floors and peering out from a balcony with a clear view of the Empire State Building. Could this be her new home?
“Guys, this was $5,000,” she tells viewers. “Over $5,000.” That was almost twice her budget.
The arduous process of finding an apartment in New York City, in the throes of the worst housing crisis in decades, is familiar to residents. The share of apartments that are available to rent is at a nearly 60-year low, and the typical asking rent was $3,850 in April, according to the listing site StreetEasy, the highest figure the company had ever recorded.
But on YouTube, apartment hunting has become something of a phenomenon, with creators like Ms. Maldonado documenting their personal searches and tapping into a global fascination with what it’s like to live in New York City.
“Whereas traditional real estate shows often stick to showing luxury homes, creators are providing a more realistic view of what so many New Yorkers face,” said Maddy Buxton, YouTube’s culture and trends manager. She called the creators “must-watch” tour guides.
The videos often have a similar structure: Creators will go through one apartment at a time, describing and debating prices, amenities, views, the likelihood of pests, nearby shops and parks and other details.
Some people watch the videos during their own apartment hunts. Many see them as entertainment that captures New York City’s quirks and frustrations — a majority of viewers, Ms. Maldonado said, live elsewhere. One person who commented on one of Ms. Maldonado’s recent videos said apartment hunting in New York should be an Olympic sport.
Some seem to be living vicariously through the creators, imagining themselves living in the city or reminiscing about their own youth. And for a few, it’s about the schadenfreude.
Another commenter, bragging that they were watching the video from a 2,400-square-foot home in North Carolina, said New York apartments looked “so tiny” in comparison.
Ms. Maldonado grew up in Texas. In 2023, she visited New York City for the first time and felt drawn to its vibrancy. Last year, she decided to move here. Ms. Maldonado, who worked in marketing, had already been posting videos about lifestyle and fitness and had hopes of making content creation a full-time job.
She immediately discovered that the city’s housing market felt like “cutthroat Hunger Games,” she said in a video.
She found that apartments flew off the market before she had a chance to see them. Monthly rents could be more than $3,000 for units smaller than a Texas kitchen. Laundry machines and air-conditioning, she discovered, were far from guaranteed. Rental applications, she found, required a mind-numbing quantity of bank statements and tax forms.
She recounted all of these experiences in her first apartment hunt video in August, with the hope that it would benefit others hoping to move.
The video quickly became one of her most popular and lucrative posts. Ms. Maldonado said the video, which had about 63,000 views as of mid-May, had generated some $550 for her so far, compared with about $22 for a typical lifestyle-focused video. She also earns money on other platforms and through sponsorships.
She made another video this year to document her search, which has over 99,000 views. Today, she supports herself by making videos full time.
“The relatability of being a YouTuber is to say, ‘Hey I’m one of you, and this is also what I’ve gone through,” Ms. Maldonado said in an interview.
The popularity of the videos is why Alexis Eldredge, 27, decided to make one in 2021. Ms. Eldredge, who has nearly 78,000 subscribers, has now had to move three times. She has made videos for each grueling hunt.
She declined to comment specifically on how much she earned from each. But she said they were top performers based on views and revenue. She noted that she had only 1,000 subscribers when she made her first video, which garnered 100,000 views and sharply increased her following.
Moving has been “good for the channel, and good for growth,” she said. “But bad for my mental health.”
Ms. Eldredge, originally from Ohio, studied musical theater and hopes to be on Broadway. During her first four years in the city from 2015 to 2019, when she was a student at a college on Staten Island, she lived in a dormitory and “never had to deal with apartment hunting,” she said.
But since she graduated and moved to Washington Heights, her experience has encapsulated many of the frustrations of apartment hunting.
The first apartment, which she shared with three roommates, had mice. She left another place, which cost her $2,115 even with two roommates, after the landlord raised the total rent by $500. She now lives with one roommate on the Upper West Side and pays $2,050, and can fully support herself by making content.
“I feel like New York housing is almost like a secret,” she said. “You don’t really know what it’s like until you know what it’s like.”
And for many creators, the videos are compelling because they tap into international curiosity about the city as a place of opportunity.
“New York has always been this American dream,” said Alia Zaita, 25, whose family moved to Seattle from Romania when she was 12. Ms. Zaita, who has 635,000 subscribers on YouTube, said most of her viewers were from other countries.
She spent six years in Toronto working as a professional ballerina, and then moved back to Seattle, where she met her husband. She started making YouTube videos about five years ago.
Ms. Zaita was a fan of apartment hunt series. She had watched several based in Tokyo, Paris and elsewhere, and had even made some during her hunts in Seattle. So when she and her then-partner found they were “really craving that European density of a city,” she began watching videos about New York City apartment hunts.
In 2023, they moved into their first New York apartment, a fourth-floor one-bedroom in NoLIta with a rent around $3,300. Her first video about the hunt immediately drew interest from people around the world, eventually accruing 440,000 views and earning Ms. Zaita about $4,000. One commenter, who said they were an 18-year-old student from Germany, lamented that they would most likely never be able to live in New York City.
The next year, when their lease was up, Ms. Zaita and her husband decided they wanted a bigger space. They looked for a two-bedroom apartment under $4,000, where one of the rooms could double as a video studio for Ms. Zaita.
They went on another hunt, eventually picking a place they liked near Downtown Brooklyn.
Now, “we have no reason to move,” she said. “I’m like, I’m going to miss out on the engagement.”
Mihir Zaveri covers housing in the New York City region for The Times.
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