Lucy Cohen Blatter

Snagging a rent stabilized or rent controlled apartment is like winning the NYC real estate lottery. As such, rent-regulated tenants usually garner more jealousy than sympathy from their fellow New Yorkers. But one writer over on Thrillist describes a real downside of being a middle class person in a stabilized apartment — a scenario she describes as "golden handcuffs."

If you've been holding off putting your Manhattan apartment on the market, now's the time to do it. At least according to real estate analytics site Urban Digs, which found that May is the month with the highest contract volume (it's just slightly higher than the second-highest month, March).

For a seller, going the DIY route (a.k.a. selling without a broker) means they can avoid paying a 6 percent fee split between the broker and the buyer's broker which, in NYC, could amount to hefty savings. The fee is usually baked into the asking price, so if a seller is going broker-less, the asking price will typically be lower — good news for the buyer, of course.

Here's a helpful NYC apartment hunting tip: If you see a duplex listed at a decent price, that means the layout is kinda funky and/or one floor is subterranean. Both are the case in this $3,000 three-bedroom in Manhattan Valley (a micro-neighborhood  in the northern part of the Upper West Side).

Public housing is woefully misunderstood.