The Yellow Line Rent Watch Returns

• July 22nd 2019

by Nena Perry-Brown

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Shortly after Amazon selected northern Virginia for its second headquarters, UrbanTurf took a look at rental rates along the Yellow Line, which hosts the three Metro stations closest to the HQ2 campus — Crystal City, Pentagon City, and National Airport. Eight months later, we are looking to see whether rents have risen near those Metro stations with easy access to National Landing. 

Below is the latest snapshot of what monthly rents for one-bedrooms look like on the Yellow Line, based on RentHop's latest Metro line rent map.

Rents have actually stagnated or gone down at the two stations closest to National Landing, staying flat at $1,850 in Crystal City and dropping by 2.5 percent to $1,825 in Pentagon City. This falls in line with a report earlier this year showing that Class A apartment absorption in northern Virginia has slowed. 

Interestingly, the three Metro stations south of National Airport have some of the highest rent increases on the Yellow Line, with rents rising by at least 6 percent in each case. While the one-bedrooms here remain more affordable than those at Crystal City and Pentagon City stations, they are inching closer to being comparable. It will be interesting to see whether rents at National Landing and further south begin ticking upward with the first wave of Amazon employees, as 79 percent of the renters in the Amazon workforce are expected to live in northern Virginia. 

Over the next 15 years, 700 Amazon employees, with an expected average salary of $150,000, are expected to live in DC proper, and it seems reasonable to presume that many of those renters will settle along the Yellow Line for optimum convenience. Although rents at Fort Totten and further eastward on the Yellow Line have inched upward over the past year, ancillary employees who will be earning much less than $150,000 a year will still be able to take advantage of the lower rents without sacrificing the convenience of a direct Metrorail route, particularly if Metro permanently extends Yellow Line service to Greenbelt.

RentHop's data looks at the site's own data for median one-bedroom rents within 0.62 miles of each Metro station.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/revisiting-the-yellow-line-rent-watch/15681.