Renters seem to be flocking to Raleigh. They spent $16.5 billion in the past decade.
The Raleigh area saw the amount of total rent paid almost double over the last decade — the second highest percentage increase in rents in the country, according to a new report from Zillow.
An estimated $16.5 billion was spent on rent in the decade, with $2 billion spent in 2019 alone, according to Zillow, the real estate database company. Those figures cover the Raleigh metropolitan statistical area, or MSA, of Wake, Johnston and Franklin counties.
The report used U.S. Census Bureau data along with Zillow’s own rental indexes and 2019 forecasts.
The total rent paid in 2019 was 91% higher than a decade earlier, Zillow reported. Only Austin, Texas, another fast-growing metro area, had a higher rate. Charlotte spent $3.6 billion in rent last year, an 80% increase over what people paid a decade ago.
“The stories of Raleigh and Austin are a culmination of the fastest growing populations in the country as well as a constantly increasing rent on average per household,” said Jeff Tucker, a Zillow economist.
The two factors used to measure growth are rent per household and population of renters.
Over the course of the decade, renters saw their monthly rent increase by 34% per household, Zillow reported, and the number of households paying rent increased by 43%.
“That’s a tremendous, staggering amount of growth in the number of renting households,” Tucker said.
An end-of-decade report based on Census data from RENTCafé, a national rental listing service, shows Raleigh ranks high among metro areas for renters.
A 30% increase this decade in suburban renter households — including in Cary and Apex — puts the Raleigh area at No. 3 in a list of the top 20 metro areas measured by that metric, just below Phoenix and Austin.
Not just millennial renters
The data suggests that renting isn’t only popular with millennials and generation Z.
Over the last decade, Raleigh ranked No. 1 on a RENTCafé list of top 20 cities with increases in aging renters, with an 88% increase in renters ages 60 and over. The Raleigh metro area was also listed as having increased its number of high-earning renters by six times from 2010 to 2018, based on households with incomes over $150,000.
“A higher share of renters at other ages across the age distribution definitely contributes to this disproportionate growth,” said Tucker. “The fact that renting households have grown faster than the rate of population growth would be consistent with a disproportionately high tendency to rent while living in the Raleigh area.”
RENTCafé cites rent prices for all housing of any size in the Raleigh area at an average of $1,244. RealPage lists the average apartment rent here at $1,174.
This story was originally published January 9, 2020 at 3:20 PM with the headline "Renters seem to be flocking to Raleigh. They spent $16.5 billion in the past decade.."
