DC Has 4th Highest Rents in Country

• June 5, 2008
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by Mark Wellborn

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Courtesy of Rentomatic.com

DC has broken into the top five in a category that that will not make city renters smile.

A report released by Boston-based Investment Instruments Corporation in April stated that DC has the fourth highest median rental rates of the twelve major metropolitan areas in the country. For the first quarter of 2008, the median rent in the DC area was $1,687/month. That was up from $1,608/month from the first quarter of 2007, a 4.9 percent increase.

Of all the DC neighborhoods, the largest percentage increase was in Mount Pleasant where the median rent increased by 18.3 percent from $1,550 to $1,899. In the Logan Circle neighborhood, the median rents increased 9.4 percent from $2,085 to $2,300. In Georgetown, the rents increased just 0.5% from $1,850 to $1,840. The only neighborhood in DC where the median rent rates actually declined was the neighborhoods around Gallaudet University.

Ahead of DC on the list are San Francisco, New York City and Los Angeles. San Francisco had the largest increase of any of the Metro areas at 14.6 percent, an increase from $1,579 to $1,810.

Owen Johnson, the president of the Investment Instruments Corporation, noted that, with the weak state of the dollar, foreigners are now seeing property deals in these cities. This means that rental properties are disappearing from the market and supply is dwindling.

“San Francisco, New York and DC are all very international cities, and while they might look expensive to the Americans that live there, from a world view, the prices aren’t that bad and the value of property looks great,” Johnson told UrbanTurf.

Johnson also hypothesized that in DC, the increase in government and military spending was leading to the creation of jobs and that was keeping the rental market expensive.

The data for this report was culled from the over 7 million listings that are currently on Rentomatic and Rentometer, rental listing directory sites that Investment Instrument Corporations owns.

“The data for these reports take into account all bedroom types,” Johnson said. “And it is important to note that this is the median rent not the average.”

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