January Rent Reports: Is Philly Up or Down?
Three major rent reports turned in their January assessments yesterday. These rent reports give snapshots of the Philadelphia and nationwide rental markets and determine trends in pricing. The three biggest reporters can’t seem to agree on whether Philly is riding an upswing or on a downward trend when it comes to rental pricing.
Three different rent reports show three very different pictures of Philadelphia’s rental market.
Philadelphia Magazine reports that the Zumper Rental Price Index shows rents in the City of Brotherly Love going upwards. Zumper’s rent report labels Philly as the seventeenth most-expensive rental market in the nation, with the median price of a one-bedroom apartment around $1,370. That’s up 0.7 percent from the month of December, and up an impressive 14.2 percent from January 2016. Two-bedroom apartments have a median cost of $1,500, which is the same as last month but over 11 percent higher than last year. Despite these trends, Philadelphia ranks behind only Baltimore as the cheapest place to live on the Northeastern coast. Zumper draws its figures from “more than one million active listings” across the country.
Then there’s Apartment List, whose rent report showed similar median rents to Zumper: $1,300 for a one-bedroom and $1,500 for a two-bedroom. Apartment List pulls data from “millions of listings on its site.” Unlike Zumper, however, Apartment List draws its trends from only two-bedroom listings. Those trends show the rental market up 0.2 percent over December, but down 0.5 percent from a year ago. That’s a huge difference, obviously. Apartment List still names Philly as the least-expensive Northeast city behind Baltimore, but because its 100 ranked cities and metro areas are different, it also has Philadelphia listed as the 29th most-expensive rental market in America.
Finally, there’s the monthly rent report from Abodo.com. Abodo’s trends couldn’t look more different from the previous two aggregators’. According to PhillyMag, “rents in Philadelphia posted the third-largest monthly drop of the 100 cities it surveys, with the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment falling 6.4 percent from $1,316 to $1,252. Only Pittsburgh, where rents dropped 6.7 percent, and Rochester, N.Y., where they fell 8.8 percent, outranked Philly. The year-over-year change was also a good bit lower than on Zumper but higher than on Apartment List: up 8.3 percent.” Philadelphia was ranked the 4th most-expensive Northeastern city, behind New York, Boston, and Washington. Abodo also draws from around one million national listings, but it places parameters on city populations and the number of listings.
