I also own the apartment I live in. But before I owned my residence, I was a renter, and thus for a period I've also experienced the mad crazy dash that is NYC apartment hunting while in the shoes of a prospective renter.
My impressions from my "lived experience" in case anyone finds it an interesting data point:
There isn't much information asymmetry, if any. Most apartments are marketed through brokers, and everyone understands, apartment seekers especially, that the broker will charge a fee that the renter must pay to the broker, and how much that fee is. In contrast, when landlords advertise their apartments without a broker, they specify in the ad that it is on a "no fee" basis. Anyone hunting for an apartment to rent who doesn't understand this at the outset of their search learns it soon enough, and certainly before they sign a lease.
My intuition is the bill requiring owners to pay the broker's fee, if it becomes law, will have little or no effect on the underlying economics. I expect the law will prove to have been mere theater, albeit perhaps theater that was "well intentioned," to borrow from a Mayor Adams' quotation in the Bloomberg article.
When I've decided what rent prices to advertise my apartments for, I've always assumed renters will pay the most they can afford to "satisfice" the apartment characteristics they seek. I've also assumed they will factor any broker's fee into deciding whether they can afford any specific apartment.
Whenever I've marketed an apartment myself, I've advertised a higher price than I would were I to advertise it through a broker, and vice versa. The rule of thumb I've used for how much to add to the monthly rent I advertise when I'm doing it without a broker, is what a broker's fee would be if I were using a broker (which is typically 15% of the first year's rent) divided by 12.
As far as I can tell, the negotiations and transactions that actually have transpired after I've marketed my apartments with and without brokers in the foregoing manner have matched the mental model of the market that I've relied on to estimate what prices to advertise.
If the new bill becomes law and thereby requires me to pay any broker fee myself, I plan to do the reverse. I'll ask for a higher price when I market one of my apartments through a broker than when I market it myself. I also expect the monthly differential I'll choose when doing it myself will continue be roughly the hypothetical broker's fee divided by 12.