Cities with the Highest Rent Increases and Decreases

Published on

The coronavirus pandemic, 2020, has created many changes for Americans with their school, work, and housing situations, and these shifts have caused significant changes in residential rental prices in some cities.

Get The Full Series in PDF

Get the entire 10-part series on Charlie Munger in PDF. Save it to your desktop, read it on your tablet, or email to your colleagues.

Q3 2020 hedge fund letters, conferences and more

AdvisorSmith, a leading resource for small business content, examined the American cities where rents are rising and falling the fastest.

They examined rental prices in 540 U.S. cities using data from Zillow and Apartment List. For their study, AdvisorSmith looked at rental prices of studios, one, two, three, and four-bedroom rental units. Rents from September 2020 were compared to the average rents in 2019. Each city's weighted increase or decrease in average rent was determined by each city's composition of rental housing units.

The study found that nationwide, the average rent increase was 0.9 percent, ranging from a decrease of -34.7 percent up to a rise of 12.5 percent. Cities with the highest rent increases were those on the outskirts of large metropolitan areas, including cities around Atlanta, Phoenix, Baltimore, and Riverside/San Bernardino counties in Southern California.

Cities With The Highest And Lowest Rental Prices

Cities Rental Prices

Cities Rental Prices

The city with the highest rent increase was Stockbridge, GA. Stockbridge had a rent increase of 12.5 percent, which is 13x higher than the average increase nationally. The weighted average rent in Stockbridge jumped from $1,300 in 2019 to $1,396 in September 2020.

residential

residential

On the other hand, cities where rents fell the most were in some of the most expensive renters' cities. Rents fell the most in the San Francisco Bay Area and the NY, Boston metro areas, and the D.C. suburbs. Many of these cities were highly represented in the top 25. Besides having some of the county's highest rents, these cities contain professional and technical workers working from home for much of the year.

The top two cities with the fastest falling rental price were located in Odessa and Midland, Texas, oil & gas cities. With oil and gas prices reaching into the negatives earlier this year because of the coronavirus pandemic, housing demand in these cities has fallen substantially.

Rent in Odessa decreased 34.7 percent in the last year and fell 30.9 percent in Midland, compared with the 0.9 percent average increase nationally. The weighted average rent in Odessa fell from $937 in 2019 to $699 in September 2020. In Midland, the weighted average rent fell from $1,226 in 2019 to $943 in September 2020.