How NYC's New Rental Buildings Are Using Digital Signage to Stand Out in Brooklyn and Queens

How NYC's New Rental Buildings Are Using Digital Signage to Stand Out in Brooklyn and Queens

8 minute read | Updated March 23, 2026

There has never been more competition for renters in Brooklyn and Queens — and the buildings opening right now are betting that the answer is more amenities.

Brooklyn is expected to see approximately 11,500 new rental units come to market over the next three years. Queens is expected to see approximately 13,300. The neighborhoods absorbing most of that new supply — Long Island City, Williamsburg, Gowanus, Greenpoint, Bushwick — are seeing lease-up competitions that would have been unimaginable a decade ago, when a new building in any of these neighborhoods could fill up on the strength of the neighborhood alone.

More Units, More Competition

The new buildings coming online in LIC and Gowanus and Greenpoint are not competing on location. They are competing on amenity packages that have reached a level of elaboration that strains the definition of the word. One new lease-up currently on the market offers an indoor pool, a regulation-size basketball court, a multi-sport simulator, a spa with steam room and sauna, a podcast studio, work pods, and multiple meeting rooms — and it is competing for the same renters as buildings two blocks away with comparable packages.

The question that amenity escalation inevitably produces — and that the leasing agents working these buildings encounter on every tour — is not whether the amenities exist. It's whether the renter standing in front of you believes they will actually use them. And the answer to that question is determined not by the amenities themselves but by the infrastructure that makes them accessible, legible, and functional on an ordinary Tuesday in February.

That infrastructure is digital signage. And in Brooklyn and Queens' current lease-up environment, the buildings that have it working from day one are having materially different leasing conversations than the ones that don't.

The Borough Supply Picture Is Real and Neighborhood-Specific

The new supply hitting Brooklyn and Queens is not evenly distributed. It is concentrated in specific neighborhoods where the combination of rezoning, transit access, and developer interest has created genuine pipeline density — and where the lease-up competition is consequently most intense.

Long Island City in Queens is the single most active new development submarket in the outer boroughs, with a pipeline of new rentals that has been building for years and is now delivering at scale. The neighborhoods along the 7 train and the G train — LIC, Sunnyside, Woodside — are seeing new buildings open within blocks of each other, often within the same leasing season, competing for the same Manhattan-adjacent renter who wants more space for less money than a comparable Midtown or Chelsea apartment would cost.

In Brooklyn, the active frontier has shifted. Williamsburg and Greenpoint — which led the borough's rental development wave a decade ago — are still delivering new product, but the most intense current activity is in Gowanus, where the 2021 rezoning opened a formerly industrial corridor to residential development that is now producing a significant pipeline of new rentals. Bushwick continues to attract renters priced out of Williamsburg, with new buildings opening in a neighborhood whose character is changing faster than its reputation has caught up. And the Brooklyn waterfront from DUMBO to Red Hook is seeing continued development pressure that adds to the borough's overall supply picture.

In every one of these neighborhoods, the new building opening this spring is competing with the one that opened last fall and the one that will open next fall. The renter choosing between them has options that didn't exist two years ago, and the margin between a building that leases up in 60 days and one that takes six months is measured in exactly the kind of daily operational details that most developers don't think about until after the first resident moves in.

Amenity Fatigue Is Real in Brooklyn and Queens Too

The amenity escalation that has characterized luxury multifamily development in Manhattan for the past decade has fully migrated to Brooklyn and Queens, and it has produced the same result: buildings where the amenity package is so comprehensive that it has ceased to be a differentiator and has become simply the price of entry.

An indoor pool and a basketball court are impressive on a floor plan. They are less impressive when the prospective renter on your tour has already seen three other buildings this week with indoor pools and basketball courts. The podcast studio and the multi-sport simulator and the spa with steam room and sauna — amenities that would have been remarkable two years ago — are becoming standard enough in the LIC and Gowanus pipeline that leasing agents can no longer lead with them as proof points.

What leasing agents in these neighborhoods are discovering is that the renters they are competing for have become sophisticated consumers of the amenity pitch. They have toured enough buildings to know that the amenity package on the brochure and the amenity package in practice are not always the same thing. The rooftop that requires calling the leasing office during business hours to book. The coworking lounge that is perpetually occupied with no visibility into availability. The package room that has no notification system and requires a trip downstairs to check whether anything has arrived. These are not hypothetical failures. They are the daily operational reality in buildings where the amenity infrastructure was designed to impress on a tour and not engineered to function in everyday use.

Digital signage is the layer that closes the gap between the amenity package as marketed and the amenity package as lived. It is the booking screen outside the coworking lounge that shows real availability. It is the package notification display in the elevator lobby that tells residents a delivery has arrived before they even think to check. It is the amenity booking interface on the lobby kiosk that lets a resident reserve the basketball court for Saturday morning without talking to anyone. In Brooklyn and Queens' current lease-up environment, these are not nice-to-haves. They are the operational difference between an amenity package that retains residents and one that generates move-out notices at month nine.

Long Island City: The Most Competitive Submarket in the Outer Boroughs

Long Island City deserves specific attention because the density of new supply there is creating lease-up dynamics that have no parallel elsewhere in Brooklyn or Queens.

A renter choosing an apartment in LIC right now can walk from one new building to another without leaving the immediate neighborhood, comparing amenity packages, finishes, and pricing that are often nearly identical. The buildings competing in this market are not differentiated by location — they are all a short walk from the 7 train and a quick ride to Midtown. They are not differentiated by price — the market has converged to a range that makes $50-per-month differences almost irrelevant as a decision driver. And they are increasingly not differentiated by amenities, for the reasons described above.

What they are differentiated by is the felt quality of the management experience on a tour. And in LIC's hyper-competitive market, the lobby is where that felt quality is established or undermined within the first two minutes of arrival.

A lobby in Long Island City that has a working touchscreen directory, a clean visitor management check-in process, and a package notification display that is clearly current and functional is a lobby that tells a prospective renter something immediate: this building is managed well, the technology works, and the experience of living here will be organized rather than chaotic. A lobby that has empty screen frames, a paper sign-in sheet, and a leasing agent who spends the first five minutes of the tour apologizing for systems that aren't quite set up yet tells the same renter something equally immediate — and sends them to the building two blocks away.

Gowanus: The New Frontier With the Highest Stakes

Gowanus is the most interesting lease-up market in Brooklyn right now precisely because it is the newest. The 2021 rezoning that opened the corridor to residential development created a building pipeline that is only now delivering its first significant wave of new product — which means the buildings opening in Gowanus in 2025 and 2026 are establishing the neighborhood's residential character for the first time.

The renter the Gowanus buildings are competing for is a specific profile: likely priced out of Cobble Hill or Park Slope, curious about a neighborhood that is genuinely transforming, and willing to accept some rough edges in exchange for more space at a lower price point than the established Brooklyn neighborhoods to the north and west. But "willing to accept some rough edges" does not mean willing to accept a building that feels operationally unfinished. A Gowanus renter who chose the neighborhood partly on the promise of a new, well-amenitized building has higher expectations of the building itself than a renter who chose an established neighborhood with older stock.

In a market where every new Gowanus building is trying to prove that the neighborhood is a legitimate alternative to the established Brooklyn premium corridors, the building that opens with all of its systems working — including the digital infrastructure that makes its amenity package legible and functional — is establishing a credibility signal that matters for lease-up velocity and long-term retention.

Greenpoint and Williamsburg: Retaining Residents in Established Markets

Greenpoint and Williamsburg present a different version of the digital signage challenge than LIC and Gowanus. These are established Brooklyn rental markets where the new buildings opening are not introducing the neighborhood to renters — they are competing for renters who already know and love the neighborhood and are choosing between new product and the existing stock they might already be living in.

In this context, the lease-up challenge is less about establishing credibility and more about demonstrating operational superiority over the existing rental stock. A renter who is happy in their current Williamsburg apartment and is considering moving to a new building two blocks away needs a reason to take on the hassle of moving. The amenity package is part of that reason. But the operational quality of the new building — the package notification that actually works, the amenity booking system that doesn't require a phone call, the lobby that processes visitor arrivals efficiently without a front desk attendant managing every check-in — is the part that determines whether the move feels like an upgrade or a lateral transfer.

For new buildings in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, digital signage is retention infrastructure as much as it is lease-up infrastructure. The residents who move in already have high expectations formed by years of living in one of Brooklyn's most desirable neighborhoods. Meeting those expectations every day — not just on tour day — is what drives renewal at month twelve.

Bushwick: Serving a Renter Who Values Authenticity but Expects Functionality

Bushwick presents a specific nuance that is worth naming. The Bushwick renter profile is distinct from LIC or Gowanus — generally younger, more price-sensitive, more likely to be in a creative field, and more likely to be skeptical of the kind of corporate amenity package that characterizes the most elaborately programmed new buildings in LIC.

But skepticism of amenity theater is not the same thing as tolerance for operational dysfunction. A Bushwick renter who chose their building partly because it felt less corporate than the alternatives still expects their packages to arrive with notification, their guests to be able to find them without standing in the lobby for ten minutes, and the building's communication infrastructure to work reliably. The digital signage requirements in a Bushwick building are the same as in an LIC building — package notification, visitor management, amenity booking, resident communication — they just need to be configured and presented in a way that feels integrated into the building's design aesthetic rather than dropped in as an afterthought from a corporate multifamily operator's standard specification sheet.

This is a design consideration, not a technology limitation. A well-designed digital directory kiosk that complements a Bushwick building's industrial aesthetic is a different product from the same hardware in a high-gloss LIC lobby — but the operational function is identical, and the resident expectation it serves is the same.

Package Notification Is Not Optional at This Supply Level

The package management challenge in Brooklyn and Queens' new rental buildings deserves specific attention because it is the operational pain point that generates the most resident frustration at the highest frequency.

A 300-unit building in Long Island City or Gowanus may receive 300 or more package deliveries on a peak day. Multiple carriers, multiple delivery windows, residents who are at work in Midtown during the day and not available to receive deliveries in real time. Without a notification system integrated into the lobby — screens that alert residents when a package has arrived, locker systems that generate unique retrieval codes, elevator displays that remind residents a delivery is waiting — the package operation becomes a daily source of friction that accumulates into move-out motivation over the course of a lease.

The integration that makes package notification work connects three systems that are often procured separately and never fully integrated: the package locker or room management system, the digital signage platform, and the resident notification infrastructure. When these three systems are specified together during design, by vendors who have tested integrations with each other, the result is seamless — a delivery arrives, the system logs it, a notification appears on the lobby screen and the elevator display and the resident's phone simultaneously, and the resident retrieves their package with a unique code at a time that works for them. When these systems are assembled from separately procured components after the building opens, the integration is typically incomplete, the notifications are unreliable, and the package room becomes the building's defining daily complaint.

In Brooklyn and Queens' current supply environment, where the margin between a building that retains residents and one that doesn't is measured in exactly these kinds of daily operational details, a package notification system that works reliably from day one is not a luxury. It is table stakes.

The Retention Math in a Borough Market

The financial case for digital signage in Brooklyn and Queens' new rental buildings is the same as in Manhattan, but the borough context adds a specific dimension worth noting.

Concessions in Brooklyn and Queens' most competitive submarkets — LIC in particular — are running at levels that would have been unthinkable three years ago. One to two months free rent on new leases is not unusual in buildings that are struggling to hit occupancy targets in a market where new supply has outpaced absorption. Against the cost of a single vacant unit — lost rent, concession required to attract a new tenant, turnover costs — the capital cost of a digital signage system that demonstrably improves the resident experience and increases renewal likelihood looks very different than it does as a line item on a construction budget.

Tenant turnover costs between $1,000 and $3,000 per unit for repairs, marketing, and leasing. A 15% improvement in renewal rate on a 300-unit building means 45 fewer turnovers per year — at even $2,000 per turnover, that's $90,000 in annual savings. In a market where the cost of a concession on a new lease is often $3,000 to $5,000 or more, the retention math is even more compelling. A digital signage system that pays for itself in year one through improved retention is not an optimistic scenario. In Brooklyn and Queens' current market, it is the baseline expectation for a system that is properly specified and operational from move-in day.

The Bottom Line

A new rental building in LIC, Gowanus, Greenpoint, or Bushwick that gets digital signage right looks something like this when the first resident moves in.

The lobby has a touchscreen directory kiosk configured to serve the building's specific mix of uses — residential directory with a call function for visitor check-in, amenity information with real-time availability and a booking interface, and building communication content managed by the property team through a cloud-based platform. The visitor management system allows residents to pre-register expected guests, lets visitors check themselves in, and connects to the building's access control system so authorized visitors reach the correct floor without requiring front desk intervention for every arrival.

The package notification system is integrated with the building's locker bank or package room, automatically alerting residents by phone and on lobby and elevator displays when a delivery arrives. The amenity booking screens outside the coworking lounge, the basketball court, the podcast studio, and any other reservable space show real-time availability and allow immediate booking without a phone call or a trip to the leasing office. The elevator displays in every cab are managed through the same platform as the lobby screen, updated by the property management team with building communications, maintenance notices, community events, and amenity highlights.

None of this is on the amenity brochure. It is the infrastructure that makes the amenity brochure true.

ITS, Inc. provides digital building directories, visitor management systems, package notification screens, amenity booking displays, and elevator signage for residential and mixed-use buildings across New York City, including Brooklyn and Queens. To learn how Navigo can be configured for your multifamily property, schedule a demo.

Frequently Asked Questions

What digital signage components does a new Brooklyn or Queens rental building actually need at opening?

Start with the systems that affect residents every single day and generate the most friction without them. Package notification integrated with your locker or package room system is first — in a 300-unit LIC or Gowanus building receiving hundreds of deliveries per day, this is infrastructure, not amenity. Second is a lobby directory and visitor management system that allows guests to check in and find residents without requiring staff intervention. Third is elevator screens for building-wide resident communication. Amenity booking displays come fourth — high value once the foundational systems are working, and essential for a building competing on an elaborate amenity package in a market like LIC where every competitor has the same amenities on paper. The buildings that treat these systems as finishing touches rather than infrastructure open with operational gaps that take months to close and cost more to fix than they would have cost to spec correctly from the start.

How does amenity booking technology actually work in practice for a resident wanting to reserve the basketball court or podcast studio?

A resident wanting to book a reservable amenity space interacts with either a touchscreen display outside the space itself or an app-based booking interface connected to the same backend system. The screen outside the basketball court shows current occupancy status, today's reservation calendar, and an interface for making a new reservation — the resident selects their time slot, confirms with their resident credential, and receives a confirmation. The booking is logged in the system, the calendar updates in real time so other residents see accurate availability, and the building management team has full visibility into utilization across all amenity spaces. For a building in LIC or Gowanus competing on a multi-amenity package, this system is what converts an amenity from a tour talking point into a resident retention driver — because a resident who actually uses the basketball court twice a week is a resident who has a concrete reason to renew.

Our Gowanus building has an industrial aesthetic. Can digital signage hardware be configured to match that rather than looking like it was dropped in from a generic corporate spec?

Yes, and this is a design consideration that matters more in neighborhoods like Bushwick and Gowanus than in the more standardized luxury residential corridors of LIC or waterfront Brooklyn. Digital directory kiosks and display hardware come in configurations that range from high-gloss corporate to powder-coated metal finishes that complement industrial interior design. The software interface — the visual design of the directory screen itself — can be customized to match the building's brand identity and aesthetic. The key is making these design decisions during the specification phase, when the hardware and software can be configured to the building's specific aesthetic requirements, rather than accepting a default configuration that was designed for a different kind of building. ITS works with interior architects and designers during the specification phase to ensure the signage hardware and interface design are integrated into the building's overall aesthetic rather than visually disconnected from it.

What's the difference between the visitor management needs of a Bushwick building versus a Long Island City building?

The operational requirements are the same — pre-registration for expected visitors, self-service check-in, resident notification, access control integration — but the volume and visitor profile differ. An LIC building targeting Manhattan-adjacent professionals will typically see higher volumes of professional visitors, more frequent use of the pre-registration function for daytime business visitors, and a front desk or concierge configuration that benefits from a real-time visitor dashboard. A Bushwick building with a younger, more casual resident profile may see more evening and weekend guest traffic, more reliance on the self-service check-in function, and less formal pre-registration usage. The system configuration should reflect the building's actual visitor patterns — which is a question worth asking the leasing team during design, since their knowledge of the target renter demographic directly informs how the visitor management workflow should be configured.

With 11,500 new Brooklyn units and 13,300 new Queens units coming to market, how long does lease-up typically take in this environment, and how does digital signage affect that timeline?

In Brooklyn and Queens' current supply environment, lease-up timelines for new buildings have extended compared to three years ago, when new product in neighborhoods like LIC or Gowanus could hit stabilized occupancy in 60 to 90 days. Buildings opening now into a market with significant competing supply are more commonly targeting 120 to 180 days to stabilization, with concessions required to accelerate absorption in the most competitive submarkets. Digital signage affects lease-up timeline through the tour conversion rate — the percentage of prospective renters who tour the building and sign a lease. A lobby that communicates operational competence through functional digital infrastructure converts tours at a higher rate than one that signals unfinished execution, and in a market where the same renter is touring four buildings before making a decision, the conversion rate difference compounds quickly. A building that converts 35% of tours rather than 25% reaches stabilization meaningfully faster, and the revenue impact of that acceleration dwarfs the capital cost of the signage system.

How do elevator screens work as a resident communication channel in a Brooklyn or Queens building?

Elevator screens are managed through the same cloud-based content management platform as the lobby directory and amenity screens. The property management team updates content from a web browser, scheduling routine communications in advance — amenity hours, community events, seasonal reminders — and pushing time-sensitive notices immediately when needed. In a 300-unit Brooklyn building where residents are busy professionals who may not check email reliably, elevator screens are often the most effective channel for reaching residents with building information, because they encounter the screen multiple times per day as part of their normal routine. Content can be configured by floor or building section — a resident on a floor with a package waiting sees a notification relevant to them, while residents on other floors see community event information. This level of personalization is a function of planning the system well during design, not an add-on feature that requires additional investment after the building opens.

Does it make sense to retrofit digital signage into a Brooklyn or Queens building that is already open and stabilized?

Yes, and the ROI case is strong regardless of where the building is in its lease cycle. In a stabilized building, the primary benefit shifts from lease-up conversion to resident retention and operational efficiency. A building that installs package notification, updates its lobby directory to a digital touchscreen, and adds elevator communication screens mid-cycle will see measurable improvements in resident satisfaction within 60 to 90 days of installation. In Brooklyn and Queens' current market, where concessions on new leases are eroding NOI and the cost of a single turnover is $2,000 to $3,000 or more, a retention improvement of even 10 to 15% pays for the signage system in the first year. The installation timeline for a retrofit project — assuming accessible power and data provisions — is typically four to six weeks from contract to go-live, which means a building that starts the conversation today can have the systems operational before the next lease renewal cycle.

ITS is based near DC — does it serve multifamily buildings in Brooklyn and Queens?

Yes. ITS serves the entire US and Canada. For a Brooklyn or Queens multifamily project, the relevant considerations are platform capability — handling package notification integration, visitor management at the volume outer borough buildings generate, amenity booking configuration for multi-amenity packages, and resident communication through elevator and lobby screens — combined with local installation capability and ongoing support. ITS brings that combination to the New York market alongside its 25-year track record serving residential and mixed-use properties. To discuss how Navigo can be configured for a specific Brooklyn or Queens property, schedule a demo.

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