Fresno apartment rents hit all-time high and still rising. Is there any sign of a slowdown?
Apartment rents in the city of Fresno continued to set new records last month, reaching their highest average monthly price ever at more than $1,470 per month.
Over the past 12 months, the average rent for market-rate apartment units in California’s fifth-largest city rose by $243 between October 2020 and October 2021.
ApartmentList.com, a San Francisco-based apartment research company, reports that the average Fresno rent a year ago was $1,229 per month. The average rent breached $1,300 for the first time ever in March, surpassed $1,400 per month in July, and reached $1,472 per month in October.
That’s a year-over-year average increase of $243 per month – or just shy of 20%.
The figure is an estimate of median contract rents for new leases signed each month, according to the ApartmentList methodology. The median is a midway point at which half of new leases were for a higher monthly rent and half for a lower rent.
The percentage year-over-year increases in the Fresno market were consistent across all apartment sizes, from studio units through three- and four-bedrooom apartments.
- Studio: $974 per month in October 2020, $1,167 per month in October 2021.
- One-bedroom: $952 per month in October 2020, $1,141 in October 2021.
- Two-bedroom: $1,186 per month in October 2020, $1,421 in October 2021.
- Three-bedroom: $1,583 per month in October 2020, $1,896 in October 2021.
- Four-bedroom: $1,949 per month in October 2020, $2,335 in October 2021.
The ApartmentList data does not include government-subsidized apartments for low-income families.
As dramatic as those increases are, they actually represent a slower rate – albeit slight – compared to this summer, when the average rent across all unit sizes was rising at an even faster clip. July, August and September each registered rents that were more than 21% higher than the prior year.
Nationally, the pace at which rents are increasing has slowed in recent months.
“Our national index increased by 0.8 percent from September to October, the lowest month-over-month growth rate since February,” ApartmentList analysts wrote this week in their November national rent report.
“Although the pace of rent growth has slowed down significantly from its July peak, growth is still outpacing pre-pandemic trends, with rents continuing to rise during a time of year when seasonality normally causes prices to dip.”
“Despite a significant slowdown, rent growth is continuing to exceed its pre-pandemic trend,” the report stated.
Nationwide, however, there may be a turning point as vacancy rates rose. “With our national vacancy index ticking up for the second straight month, the rental market seems to be turning a corner from the unprecedented rent growth that has characterized most of this year,” the analysts wrote.
Still cheaper than many cities
A monthly rent of $1,472 per month – or a little less than $18,000 a year – might induce sticker shock among some apartment hunters in a market where the median annual household income is just over $50,000.
But the average rent estimate is cheaper than all but one of California’s 10 largest cities. Only Bakersfield, in Kern County, registered a lower average rent in October at $1,433 per month:
- San Francisco: $2,366 per month average, up 9.7% year-over-year, down 9.3% since January 2017.
- San Jose: $2,319 per month average, up 8.1% year-over-year, up 6.2% since January 2017.
- San Diego: $2,313 per month average, up 17.9% year-over-year, up 30.8% since January 2017.
- Anaheim: $2,148 per month average, up 15.4% year-over-year, up 21.4% since January 2017.
- Los Angeles: $1,927 per month average, up 10.4% year-over-year, up 7.7% since January 2017.
- Oakland: $1,899 per month average, down 2% year-over-year, down 3.9% since January 2017.
- Sacramento: $1,768 per month average, up 14.4% year-over-year, up 38.4% since January 2017.
- Long Beach: $1,710 per month average, up 9.1% year-over-year, up 18.3% since January 2017.
- Fresno: $1,472 per month average, up 19.8% year-over-year, up 53.2% since January 2017.
- Bakersfield: $1,433 per month, up 18.8% year-over-year, up 39.9% since January 2017.
Fresno and Bakersfield, while less expensive than the other big cities in the state, had the highest year-over-year increases in average rent, as well as the largest percentage increases in rent since the start of 2017.
The last time the calculated average rent declined in Fresno was a meager $7-per-month drop between December 2019 and January 2020.
Just because rents are lower in Fresno relative to most other California cities, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are “affordable” for renters.
More than 50,000 renter households in Fresno spent at least 30% of their household income on rent, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Under federal standards set in 1981, households that pay more than 30% of income are considered “rent-burdened.”
Outside of the 10 largest cities in California, the highest average rents among 122 communities noted in the ApartmentList data were in suburbs in the Bay Area and in Southern California. In Marina Del Rey, a tony enclave of fewer than 10,000 residents in Los Angeles County, the average apartment rent came in at more than $4,200 per month – the only community in the state in which the average exceeded $4,000.
The only city coming in with lower rents than Fresno and Bakersfield was Chico, about an hour north of Sacramento in Butte County, at $1,317 per month.
This story was originally published November 8, 2021 at 7:56 AM.
