The Orange and Blue Line Rent Watch

• March 11th 2019

by Nena Perry-Brown

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As Amazon gears up to begin filling its first 64,000 square feet of office space over the next year, UrbanTurf has resumed its look at what rental rates are looking like along Metro lines that run near or through National Landing.

Along with the Yellow Line, the Blue Line stops in Pentagon City and Crystal City, two of the three jurisdictions that comprise National Landing. Amazon employees and other ancillary workers would have a roughly 30-minute journey from Stadium-Armory Metro station to Crystal City Metro, whether the trip is a straight shot on the Blue Line or a transfer from the Orange to the Yellow Line. 

RentHop provided UrbanTurf with median one-bedroom rent data along the Metro lines as part of its ongoing series of Metro line rent maps. Below is a snapshot of what monthly rents look like on stations shared between the Orange and Blue Lines (as well as part of the still under-construction Silver Line).

The above rates indicate that in most cases, renters pay a slight premium to live both in the District and proximate to multiple Metro lines. Considering that Amazon employees are expected to have an average salary of $150,000, many may be drawn to having a DC address along the Orange and Blue Lines.

On the Orange and Blue Lines, living just within the District towards the Prince George's County line offers the best value for renters, with median rents here holding steady over the past year. The least expensive Metro stations to live near are on the Orange Line, where renting just one stop away from Stadium-Armory can save you nearly $900 on a one-bedroom apartment.

Overall, it is slightly more expensive to rent along the Blue Line than the Orange Line, although if one wants to rent in Virginia, living within a stop or three from National Landing on the Blue Line is a better deal than renting past Court House on the Orange Line. However, rents at the Crystal City Metro station in particular have already risen by 3.6 percent over the past year.

As with the Yellow Line, UrbanTurf plans to keep an eye on rents along the Orange and Blue Lines to see whether rates rise as Amazon begins hiring for its northern Virginia campus.

The above rental rates are medians for one-bedrooms between December 2018 and February 2019; the year-over-year deltas use one-bedroom median rents between December 2017 and February 2018. Any commute time estimates do not account for the time between transferring lines or any Metrorail delays.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/the-orange-and-blue-line-rent-watch/15103.