Last Friday, Juan Benitez, a Puerto Rican insurance executive, took a late-evening flight from San Juan to New York and arrived here at midnight. The purpose of his visit: to sign a contract the following morning on an East Side rental apartment he had seen a week earlier. Actually, it wasn’t a particularly great apartment – small, two bedrooms, and no dining area for $4,350 a month – but it’s what he thought was the best deal he could get for his occasional trip to the Big Apple.

Alas, he blew it. Someone else grabbed the apartment earlier that Friday, and now Mr. Benitez is out shopping again for another rental. But getting one, at least something desirable, is easier said than done because rentals, basically a dead market four months ago, are on fire again, a number of real estate brokers tell me.

“You have no idea what’s going on; it’s crazy out there,” says Mr. Benitez’s broker, Deanne Esses, senior vice-president of Bellmarc Realty, one of the city’s leading realtors. “If you find a decent rental, you either rent it or lose it. You can’t dilly-dally anymore.”

I caught up with Ms. Esses the other day at a cocktail party attended by a number of the who’s who of New York real estate to celebrate the 40th birthday of Mitchel Maidman, president of luxury apartment developer Maidman & Co.

One developer at the party seemed to capture the mood of the attendees and their current view of the real estate market. “You can’t stop expanding,” he said; “It’s develop or die.”

While a lot of publicity greeted Donald Trump’s financial woes in Atlantic City, Ms. Esses observes that “the Trump name is still golden when it comes to apartment sales.”

She notes, for example, that it took her three weeks to get an appointment to show a prospective buyer, a mortgage broker, a small 742-squarefoot model one-bedroom apartment at a new Trump building going up in the west 60s at 120 Riverside Boulevard. It’s already 50% sold. Her client grabbed the apartment, which went for $975,000.

Before chatting with Ms. Esses at the cocktail party, earlier in the day I saw a segment on CNN’s Financial News Network about a coming real estate bubble. It was the latest news organization to hop aboard a theme that many in the press have been promoting for well over a year.

Told about the CNN segment, Ms. Esses labeled it “ridiculous.” Quipped the broker: “Maybe they were thinking about Baghdad, certainly not New York.”

Talking about rentals, she notes there’s been a dramatic change in this business over the past four months. No longer, she said, are landlords offering free rent for a month or so, or footing the 15% fee that brokers normally get from renters for introducing them to an apartment. Now, the renter is once again paying the broker’s fee, and rental prices, she said, “are up, up, and away.”

Ms. Esses observes, for example, that ritzy monthly rentals at Bellmarc of $18,000 to $20,000 are becoming more conspicuous. What’s more, some apartment owners are also getting into the rental act. For example, one Bellmarc client, the owner of a three-bedroom apartment in a fancy West Side condominium building (the Park Imperial), had made an effort to sell it for $6 million. Unsuccessful, he’s now renting it for $20,000 a month.

Overall, Ms. Esses figures the rental market is about three to four times stronger than it was three to four months ago, leading her to believe prices are headed back to the lofty levels they were at two years ago. She figures rental prices rose 20%-25% over the past four months and thinks they may rise yet another 15%-20% over the next six months.

Ms. Esses calculates that two-bedroom apartments in more desirable buildings have risen from about $4,000 to $5,500 in the past three months, while one-bedroom residences climbed from $3,500 to $4,800 and studios jumped from around $1,400 to $2,400.

Why so? Because, she explains, there’s a scarcity of product and soaring apartment prices are making purchases increasingly more difficult. In a number of cases, she said, even if a buyer can obtain a mortgage, making the 20%-25% down payment is a lot tougher than it used to be because of the mushrooming prices.

As for her business, Ms. Esses noted, “It’s booming. I had 29 messages on my voice-mail when we started talking 40 minutes ago. If I checked now, there would be more than 50. My phone just won’t stop.

I’m working seven days a week and I still can’t keep up. As I told you before, it’s wild out there. If you don’t believe me, just try renting a nice apartment that you think you can afford.”

Meanwhile, it’s far from a 100% rosy picture. A lot new buildings are going up, as well as interest rates.