Apartment rents keep rising in the Fresno area. Here’s how much they’ve gone up
The average cost to rent an apartment in the Fresno market keeps going up month after month – a continuous climb to prices not seen before in the region, whether you rent a small studio apartment or a larger four-bedroom unit.
Over the past year, the median rent for an apartment in Fresno County has increased by almost $280 per month from where it was a year ago, rising from $1,157 in July 2020 to $1,436, according to an analysis of 200 large metro areas across the United States by ApartmentList.com.
The Fresno area’s year-over-year rise of more than 19% in median rent – the point at which half of units cost more and half cost less – is the largest percentage increase among 16 California metro areas included in the data. That includes such notoriously high-priced markets as San Jose, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
It’s also the metro area with the third-highest percentage hike in the entire country, behind only St. George, Utah, and Athens/Clark County in Georgia.
At the start of 2017, the median monthly rent for an apartment in Fresno was $934. The $502 difference over the intervening 4 1/2 years amounts to an increase of almost 54% – also the highest rate in the state and fifth highest in the U.S.
The last time that the median rent decreased, according to the ApartmentList data, was a modest $2-per-month drop from May 2020 to June 2020.
“The current boom in rents is playing out in virtually every major market across the country,” analysts Chris Salviati, Igor Popov, and Rob Warnock wrote in the ApartmentList report issued this week. “For most of 2020, rents were falling precipitously in the nation’s most expensive markets, while affordable mid-sized markets saw rent growth accelerate amid the pandemic. In contrast, 2021 has seen rapid rent growth across the board.”
Despite the rapid increase, a localized report indicated that “Fresno is still more affordable than most large cities across the country.”
“As rents have increased sharply in Fresno, large cities nationwide have seen rents grow more modestly, or in some cases, even decline,” the report stated.
In the San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley market, despite being the third most expensive place to rent an apartment in California, the median rent price was $51 less this month than it was at the start of 2017, a drop of 2.2% to 2,220 per month. It’s also lower than a pre-pandemic peak of more than $2,400 per month in the spring and summer of 2019.
July 2021 median rents among California markets in the report were:
- San Jose/ Sunnyvale/ Santa Clara, $2,362 per month, 3% more than a year ago.
- Oxnard/ Thousand Oaks/ Ventura, $2,330 per month, 8.8% more than a year ago.
- San Francisco/ Oakland/ Berkeley, $2,220 per month, 0.2% more than a year ago.
- San Diego/ Chula Vista/ Carlsbad, $2,146 per month, 7.9% more than a year ago.
- Santa Cruz/ Watsonville, $2,120 per month, 1.7% less than a year ago.
- Vallejo, $2,107 per month, 12.3% more than a year ago.
- Santa Maria/ Santa Barbara, $2,101 per month, 14.8% more than a year ago.
- Santa Rosa/ Petaluma, $2,085 per month, 4.4% more than a year ago.
- Salinas, $2,004 per month, 13.7% more than a year ago.
- Stockton, $1,999 per month, $15.5% more than a year ago.
- Los Angeles/ Long Beach/ Anaheim, $1,980 per month, 3% more than a year ago.
- Riverside/ San Bernardino/ Ontario, $1,909 per month, 13.1% more than a year ago.
- Sacramento/ Roseville/ Folsom, $1,835 per month, 15.1% more than a year ago.
- Fresno, $1,436 per month, 19.3% higher than a year ago.
- Chico, $1,296 per month, 14.9% more than a year ago.
- Bakersfield, $1,212 per month, 11% more than a year ago.
While apartments in Fresno and the Valley tend to cost less to rent than much of the rest of California, rent affordability remains a concern for many renters in the region, not only low-income families.
About 60% of renters in Fresno County are considered “rent burdened” under federal guidelines because they pay at least 30% of their gross income on rent and related utilities.
