Zumper National Rent Report: February 2021

Outside of the SF Bay Area, we saw prices drop dramatically in the nation’s most expensive cities throughout 2020, while modestly priced, mid-sized cities grew significantly as renters migrated from historically costly cities to cheaper, often neighboring places. This trend appears to have slowed considerably as well. The median 1-bedroom price in the top 8 most expensive cities, denoted by the dark blue line in the chart below, took a nosedive starting around July of 2020. That decline ramped up through about October, but has slowed down to an almost-flat monthly growth rate by January, 2021. The result is an almost perfect inverted-S shape, indicating that declines have slowed in this group of cities, and that prices could be stabilizing around a discount of about 20% from a year ago. The top 8 cities are the 8 most expensive as ranked in the January, 2020 report: San Francisco, CA; New York, NY; Boston, MA; Oakland, CA; San Jose, CA; Washington DC; Los Angeles, CA; and Seattle, WA.