CoreLogic, a leading global property information, analytics and data-enabled solutions provider, today released its latest Single-Family Rent Index (SFRI), which analyzes single-family rent price changes nationally and across major metropolitan areas.
U.S. rent prices continued their double-digit gains in February, rising 13.1% from one year earlier to hit another new record as the highest in the history of the index. Warmer areas of the country again posted the largest price hikes, with rents in Miami up 39.5% from February 2021. A shortage of available rentals has contributed to the prolonged run-up in price growth, as has the low U.S. unemployment rate, which dropped to 3.8% in February. Also, robust home price increases, up 20% year over year in February, are likely contributing to more Americans renting rather than buying.
“Single-family rents rose at more than three times the rate from a year earlier and more than four times the pre-pandemic rate,” said Molly Boesel, principal economist at CoreLogic. “Strong employment and low supply have pushed single-family rental vacancy rates to low levels and have contributed to the high growth in rents.”
To gain a detailed view of single-family rental prices, CoreLogic examines four tiers of rental prices. National single-family rent growth across the four tiers, and the year-over-year changes, were as follows:
Among the 20 metro areas shown in Table 1, Miami again had the highest year-over-year increase in single-family rents in February 2022 at 39.5%, another sizable gain from its February 2021 growth rate of 3%. Orlando and Phoenix logged the second- and third-highest gains at 22.2% and 18.9% respectively, reflecting an influx of Americans migrating to Sun Belt states. Meanwhile, the Washington, D.C. area and St. Louis recorded the lowest annual rent price growth, both at 6.5% in February.
Differences in rent growth by property type emerged after the pandemic, as renters desired standalone properties in lower-density areas. This trend drove an uptick in rent growth for detached rentals in 2021, while the gains for attached rentals was more moderate. However, as rental inventory remains slim, the gap between attached and detached rental growth started to close last fall. In February of 2022, attached rental property prices grew by 12.9% year over year, compared to the 12.8% increase recorded for detached homes. This is the closest that attached and detached growth rates have been since December 2019.
Methodology
The single-family rental market accounts for half of the rental housing stock, yet unlike the multifamily market, which has many different sources of rent data, there are minimal quality adjusted single-family rent transaction data. The CoreLogic Single-Family Rent Index (SFRI) serves to fill that void by applying a repeat pairing methodology to single-family rental listing data in the Multiple Listing Service. CoreLogic constructed the SFRI for close to 100 metropolitan areas — including 47 metros with four value tiers — and a national composite index.
The CoreLogic Single-Family Rent Index analyzes data across four price tiers: Lower-priced, which represent rentals with prices 75% or below the regional median; lower-middle, 75% to 100% of the regional median; higher-middle, 100%-125% of the regional median; and higher-priced, 125% or more above the regional median.
Median rent price data is produced monthly by CoreLogic RentalTrends. RentalTrends is built on a database of more than 11 million rental properties (over 75% of all U.S. individual owned rental properties) and covers all 50 states and 17,500 ZIP codes.
To learn more about the data behind this article and what CoreLogic has to offer, visit https://www.corelogic.com/.
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