Report: Most renters from specific area
Lehigh Valley experiencing interesting trends in those looking to enter or exit
Move closer to your world, my friend (as the iconic theme song from WPVI-TV in Philadelphia tells us).
According to the new Apartment List Renter Migration Report, the Lehigh Valley is seeing some interesting trends in the behavior of millions of renters potentially entering and exiting the area, especially those from The City of Brotherly Love.
The new data breaks down the users who searched Apartment List from January through March of this year. It showed over 40% of people are looking for their next home in a new metro area, and 27% were searching in a new state, which the site says were both well above pre-pandemic benchmarks.
Outbound searches were all searches performed by users who live in a specific metro, regardless of where they were searching; inbound searches were all searches within the metro, regardless of where the user lives.
In the Allentown metropolitan statistical area (which covers Lehigh, Northampton and Carbon counties in Pennsylvania and Warren County in New Jersey), data showed:
45% of apartment hunters are looking to leave town. The most popular destinations among people looking to exit the area were Philadelphia, New York, and East Stroudsburg.
In the other direction, 50% of renters looking for rentals in the area were searching from out of town. Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C. provided the most inbound search interest, data showed, with 41.3% from Philadelphia.
Overall, the report indicates the Lehigh Valley area is popular, but is experiencing high turnover.
The likely reason? The average residential rent in the area has increased dramatically, a report from Rent.com said last month.
It showed prices spiked throughout Allentown over the last year, with source data including listings from Rent.com, Apartment Guide and Redfin. The data was broken down by the number of bedrooms in each unit and specific neighborhoods in
each city.
It showed the average price of renting a studio apartment in Allentown was up 2%, around $1,611. However, monthly price increases for one and two-bedroom apartments skyrocketed, up 38%
and 41%, respectively. A one-bedroom was around $1,837 a month, while a two-bedroom apartment was around $2,193.
Those prices rivaled areas like King of Prussia and Malvern, and were comparable to or more than what people were paying in Philadelphia, West Chester, Conshohocken and Norristown.
Experts say it would explain why a good deal of people want to leave those more densely populated areas for a place like the Lehigh Valley, if they can find and afford a rental property in the area.
Pennsylvania faced a pre-pandemic housing affordability problem, but the crisis made matters worse, a recent report from the Keystone Research Center and the PA Budget and Policy Center said.
The report laid out policy recommendations for the state legislature, including the expansion of eviction mitigation, as well as the establishment of a a permanent rental assistance fund for the large numbers of cost-burdened families in the commonwealth.
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there is a shortage of rental homes that are affordable and available to extremely low-income households in Pennsylvania, or those where incomes are at or below the poverty guideline of 30% of their area’s median income. Many of those households are considered cost-burdened, spending more than half of their income on housing.
Experts say severely cost-burdened households are more likely than other renters to sacrifice other necessities like healthy food and health care to pay the rent, and to experience unstable housing situations such as evictions.
Area landlords and property managers don’t see rental prices falling anytime soon, they told The Morning Call in January; if anything, they think they’ll most likely increase over the next two years, or even longer.