Yes, rent prices are still soaring.
The median rent in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas reached $1,827 in April — marking the 14th straight month of consecutive highs, and a 16.7% increase from last April, a new report from Realtor.com shows.
The good news? Rent growth is slowing a bit after hitting a 17.1% peak in January, according to Realtor.com.
The bad news? The national median rent will surpass $2,000 in August if rent growth doesn’t slow any further, with tenants living across the Sun Belt or in studio apartments being among the most impacted.
“April data illustrates the perfect storm of supply and demand dynamics behind the continued rent surge, from a low number of available rentals to higher for-sale housing costs forcing many would-be buyers to rent for longer than planned,” Realtor.com Chief Economist Danielle Hale said in a statement. “Renters are being left with few options but to meet higher rents and, in some cases, even offer above asking — whether they can afford to or not.”
“‘Renters are being left with few options but to meet higher rents and, in some cases, even offer above asking — whether they can afford to or not.’”
(Realtor.com is operated by News Corp subsidiary Move Inc., and MarketWatch is a unit of Dow Jones, which is also a subsidiary of News Corp.)
It goes without saying that renters are already feeling the burn. Inflation is at a 40-year high, driven in part by housing prices and an inventory crunch. And a recent quarterly survey of landlords and renters from online real-estate services platform Avail — which is also part of Realtor.com — showed more than three-quarters of renter households as saying they were saving less money due to increasing costs compared to this time last year.
Rents in Miami, for example, have skyrocketed by nearly 52% in the past year, according to Realtor.com. Two dozen municipal mayors in the Miami-Dade County area met Wednesday to discuss the affordable-housing crisis, according to the Miami Herald, while the leader of Hialeah, an overwhelmingly Hispanic city with a poverty rate of 19.6%, warned that “people are parking campers and trailers outside next to their homes, and renting them out for $800 and $900 a month.”