A New York City renter has gone viral after revealing the painstaking strategy she used to score a two-bedroom stabilized apartment in Central Brooklyn — for a sweet $1,680 per month.

But Alexandra Dye’s incredibly hustle-heavy method, laid out in a TikTok video that has racked up more than 335,000 views, is not for the faint of heart. 

It requires digging through expired listings on StreetEasy, cold-emailing brokers in bulk and accepting a brutal rejection rate that would discourage most apartment hunters before they got started.

The technique hinges on a little-known StreetEasy search function.

Dye, 29, instructs hopeful renters to input their preferred neighborhoods, bedroom count and budget under the Rentals filter, then scroll to the Keywords field and type “rent-stabilized.” 

The twist: switching the listing status to “Rented” before hitting search. That change surfaces a trove of previously rented stabilized units that never would have appeared in a standard search.

From there, renters are told to contact the brokers attached to those old listings directly, pitching themselves with a detailed template that includes income, budget, pet situation and desired neighborhoods — essentially handing brokers everything they need to match a tenant on the spot.

“I got maybe one response per 15 to 20 messages I sent,” Dye says in the video. “That’s fine. The goal is to just find a couple of the right contacts that you’re looking for.”

The logic behind the workaround is rooted in how the rent-stabilized market actually operates. Units rarely hit public listings because brokers and landlords already have warm pipelines of interested renters. Dye’s method is essentially a way to force yourself into that pipeline from the outside.

“They are really often not listed at all,” she explains. “If a broker has a rent-stabilized unit, they don’t even have to list it because they know people already who are interested. You want to be one of those people.”

Dye is upfront that the process consumed her. 

“I created like a full-time job, essentially,” she says. “I was exhausted.”

She also flags one financial caveat renters should go in knowing: approaching a broker off-market typically means owing a broker’s fee. Dye paid one, but says the math still worked in her favor. 

“If I divide that out by like 12 months, it still keeps me under my original budget,” she says, “and I have the right to stay however long I don’t leave this unit, which is amazing.”

The proof of concept has already extended beyond Dye herself. A friend’s boyfriend recently used the same approach and landed a rent-stabilized unit on the Upper West Side.

“This method has worked,” Dye says. “Hunting in New York City is insane and brutal.” 

“Is it worth it? Absolutely.”