Austin 2018 rent jump highest in Texas

It’s not your imagination: Austin rents rose substantially in 2018. According to a year-end report from apartment listings site RentCafe (which gets its numbers from market analysis site YardiMatrix), local area apartment costs climbed 4.4 percent over the past year.

Average apartment rent in Austin increased from $1,304 to $1,361/month, according to the report. Despite the fact that it’s not the fastest-growing city in the state, that’s still a bigger leap than that made by other large cities in Texas, including Fort Worth (3.8 percent), San Antonio (3.5 percent), Dallas (2.7 percent), and Houston (1.7 percent).

Austin’s average rent amount was also higher than that of the other four cities, with Dallas’s the second highest, at $1,182, and San Antonio’s coming in lowest of the group, at $1,016.

The city also made the top 10 on site’s national list of “renter mega-hubs,” although just barely, topping only Tampa, Florida, in that set of cities for highest year-over-year increase. Other cities on that list are, naturally, places such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Seattle, Washington.

RentCafe credits “favorable economic factors ... and rising interest rates” for a national year-over-year rise in average monthly rent to $1,419, or 3.1%—a higher amount but lower percentage than Austin’s 2018 averages.

In another of the site’s reports, Austin’s Brentwood neighborhood made the list of top 20 “trending millennial ZIP codes” in 2018. We’ll leave what that means to your interpretation.