In a city where a rented apartment is harder to come by than a full-time job, many New Yorkers joke that they would kill for the perfect apartment.

And in March, two young Manhattan men did precisely that. Bernard Perez, 20, and Rahman Williams, 21, propelled themselves to the top of a 140,000-strong waiting list by murdering two sitting tenants and moving into their apartments.

After strangling 44-year-old Doris Drakeford and disposing of her body in the nearby Harlem River, Perez moved himself into her north Manhattan apartment. When the police later questioned him about Drakeford's disappearance, Perez and Williams, his accomplice, vacated the first apartment, murdered and decapitated another tenant, Gerry Pollard, and promptly moved into his apartment nearby.

Days later, police officers recovered Pollard's hands, torso and legs, which had been strewn around the neighbourhood. His severed head was found in a plastic bag underneath the kitchen sink.

Perez and Williams - both imprisoned on charges of first-degree murder - gave the difficulty of securing a rent-stabilised apartment in Manhattan as their motivation.

While a housing scarcity can hardly explain the pair's grisly actions, there is indeed a vacancy rate of just 2.6 per cent in New York. Rent-stabilised apartments such as those of Perez and Williams' victims are even harder to come by.

Despite the terrorist attacks on Manhattan, American and international migrants continue to flock to New York.

According to Sheila Carrol, director of corporate relocations at Citi Habitats Real Estate, there has barely been a dip in the property rental market in the past two weeks.

New York apartments are still very much in demand, she says. "It is really easy to fill these apartments. In fact, it is rare for our apartments to stay vacant for an entire day." Absurdly, a long-term tenant who pays rent promptly is not necessarily an attractive prospect.

Annette Friedman, an 85-year-old widow, who has rented her apartment in Manhattan's Upper West Side since 1948, recently faced an eviction order.

"After my husband died, whenever I sent in the rent cheques, the landlord sent them right back." Eventually, 269 Realty (unsuccessfully) attempted to evict Friedman for non-payment of rent.

Friedman is a rent-controlled tenant and as such pays about $2,000 a month for a huge, gracious apartment that is worth in excess of $1m.

Other, even more unscrupulous, landlords have resorted to hiring thugs to terrorise tenants or switching off electricity supplies for months at a time in order to drive out rent-controlled tenants.

Rent controls were introduced in New York in the 1940s to counteract post-war hardship and homelessness, allowing tenants to remain in their homes indefinitely for lenient rents. Today, rent control has almost been phased out and applies only to long-standing tenants who continue to fall under the jurisdiction of the laws for as long as they remain in their original apartments.

For instance, a tenant of a rent-controlled Upper East Side one-bedroom apartment might pay $700 a month - just 25 per cent of the market rate. Some frustrated landlords go to great lengths to rid their buildings of rent-controlled tenants (and thus free to raise rents by as much as 200 per cent).

For downtown Manhattan landlord Abel Weiss, the only way to get rid of unwanted tenants was to arrange to have them killed. Weiss admitted in court last year that he had paid a criminal called Crazy Eddie $4,000 (in instalments) to inject one tenant with a lethal dose of heroin and set fire to the apartment of another.

Weiss's plan was foiled when the would-be hitman confessed to police.

Rent control is being phased out throughout the US and replaced with rent stabilisation whereby rental guidelines are laid out and monitored by the Rent Guidelines Board. (In New York this year landlords can only raise rents on stabilised properties by 2 per cent for a one-year lease renewal.)

But rent-stabilised apartments are relatively rare and attract long waiting lists.

According to Carrol: "Without rent stabilisation a landlord is entitled to charge whatever rent he wants.

"We have tenants coming in to us whose rents triple, or at least double, from one year to the next."

But despite the ludicrous rent increases, the demand for rented property - at any cost - continues to outstrip supply across the nation.

The scarcity of accommodation has reached crisis point in San Francisco where rents have doubled in the past five years.

"A one-bedroom apartment here averages $2,000 a month but we have a rental vacancy rate of less than 1 per cent," says San Francisco letting agent Jeffrey Ancker.

Despite the precarious nature of renting property in New York, landlords look set to continue to maintain the upper hand in the city.

"They can definitely pick and choose and ask for whatever they want," says Carrol.

They are asking for an average of three months' rent in advance, a perfect credit history and several character references as well as bank and employment references.

Tenants are also required to pay a non-refundable broker's fee of 12 to 15 per cent of the annual rent as well as $50 for an in-depth credit report.

Some brokers, such as Citi Habitat, charge prospective tenants a further $100 for a credentials check - which is outsourced to an independent company that telephones each referee and confirms salary and bank balance details.

"We had an English lord recently who was appalled that I had to verify that he was indeed a lord and confirm his income. He could obviously afford the apartment many times over, but the landlord wanted proof that he was a lord and detailed verification of his income before he would let his apartment to him," says Carrol.