Bay Area rental markets up.
San Francisco holds top spot, whileOakland edges past San Jose into fourth
Three of the nation’s five most expensive rental markets are in the Bay Area.
That’s the word from the Zumper apartment rental website, which puts San Francisco at the top of the list, followed by New York, Boston, Oakland and San Jose. The median price for a one-bedroom apartment is $3,590 in San Francisco, $2,280 in Oakland and $2,270 in San Jose, according to the Zumper National Rent Report for April.
Just this week, San Jose put a 5 percent cap on rent increases for the 44,000 units covered by the city’s rent control law. Earlier this month, the Oakland City Council approved a 90-day moratorium on rent hikes. And a number of new analyses — by CoreLogic, Redfin, RealFacts and others — suggest that a leveling of prices may finally be occurring in the region for
homebuyers and renters.
The Zumper report is a reminder that costs already have reached such a height that a leveling will not bring relief to consumers anytime soon.
This was the first time that Oakland has edged past San Jose in the website’s rental rankings, said Zumper’s Devin O’Brien, who authored the report. He said Oakland’s growing cool factor and job growth, with Uber and other companies planning to move there, increasingly make it a magnet for renters who no longer can handle San Francisco’s stratospheric prices.
“I think San Francisco has reached a point at which for some people just the absolute number — the dollar amount required to live there — has created this response where people say, ‘You know, maybe I can commute from Oakland.’
“Oakland has just been steadily creeping up (in the rankings) and last month finally overtook San Jose by $10 for the cost of a one-bedroom,” O’Brien said. It also came within shouting distance of Boston’s $2,310 one-bedroom median: “Boston’s been a strong holder of the thirdplace position, but now Oakland’s making a pretty strong run at it.”
The $2,280 cost of a onebedroom unit in Oakland was up 14 percent from a year earlier. The cost of a two-bedroom unit there — $2,720 — was up 18.3 percent. “Both of these yearly percentages represent the highest of any city in the U.S. for each respective bedroom type,” Zumper reported.
The $2,900 cost of a two-bedroom apartment in San Jose — up 17.4 percent from a year earlier — remains higher than in Oakland. The $2,270 cost of a one-bedroom unit in San Jose was up 12.4 percent. While San Francisco’s monthly rents remain far higher — $3,590 for a one-bedroom, $4,850 for a two-bedroom — the yearover-year increases there of 5.6 percent and 5.9 percent, respectively, were mild by comparison.
O’Brien projected that 2016, overall, should bring rent increases in the “high single digits” for Oakland. San Jose’s bump should be “similar, but at a little slower rate,” he said, while San Francisco’s increase will likely be in the range of 3 or 4 percent.
Zumper’s report analyzed over 1 million active listings across the U.S. to calculate median asking rents for the top 50 metro areas by population.