Owners of rent-stabilized apartment buildings across New York City are unloading properties at steep discounts – in some cases up to 90% – as rising costs and unpaid rent push them toward financial collapse, industry representatives warned Thursday.

The alarm was raised during a Rent Guidelines Board meeting, where officials are considering Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to freeze rents for nearly one million regulated apartments citywide.

Landlord groups urged the board to approve rent increases instead, arguing that thousands of buildings are already on the brink.

“The analogy we use is 100 hard working firefighters trying to put out blazes in 5,000 buildings,” Kenny Burgos, CEO of the New York Apartment Association told the New York Post.

“It’s not possible… a rent freeze now would not hold the line. It would deepen the problem immediately in the buildings that are already closest to the edge.”

The board is expected to hold a preliminary vote in May.

According to Burgos, the crisis is especially severe in The Bronx — particularly in neighborhoods like Tremont, Hunts Point, and Fordham — which account for more than a third of the city’s most distressed properties. He noted that it is the only borough where landlords are seeing negative income across the board.

The financial strain is hitting both small and large landlords. Major developer Related Companies recently sold off its Bronx portfolio of more than 2,000 units at a $64 million loss.

Similarly, the Pinnacle Group offloaded a portfolio of 5,200 apartments across The Bronx and Brooklyn for $451 million — well below its $564 million debt — after a failed attempt by Mamdani to acquire the properties.

While a Rent Guidelines Board report found landlord income rose 6.2% overall, Burgos dismissed the figure as misleading.

“If you take one millionaire and average it with minimum wage earners, you will not get a realistic average of wages, and you can’t do that with these buildings either,” he said.