There is a lot of digital ink being spilled about fancy houses and top-notch lofts (as well as some high-valued shells of buildings) hitting the comparative stratosphere for rent and purchase in the city of Detroit.
An influx of money from speculators, suburbanites and out-of-towners has boosted housing prices, especially purchase prices, in the central core and some select neighborhoods. But the data shows that activity hasn’t actually raised the overall median rental rate. If you’re looking at property as an investment, you’re purchasing for yourself, not renting from someone else.
The new data from Abodo’s monthly National Apartment Report, a site that specializes in property listings and real estate, shows that in fact Detroit’s rental rates have dropped -1.6 percent for single bedrooms and -0.5 percent for two bedrooms in February of 2017.
That would put the median one bedroom in the city proper at $548 and a two bedroom $635, the second cheapest in the nation after Toledo, Ohio.
Nationally, prices stayed basically stable falling -0.03 percent. Some like to talk about Detroit being a red hot market, but when it comes to rentals compared to other cities in their totality, the data shows that is not true. New Orleans, Louisiana is the hottest in the nation with rents bumping up 9.7 percent, up from $967 to $1,055 per month.
Rents in Glendale, Arizona and Atlanta, Georgia also went up more than 6%.
Using the median as opposed to the average helps give us a better picture of what’s actually going on because the median is generally more useful when there are significant outliers in the data.
Another way to use this data is comparison to other cities. Above are the 10 most expensive cities per month in the country.
As you can see, what’s currently on the market now is rarely literally paying “Chicago prices.” And when we are, it’s very few and far between. When we set the rate to $1700+ for a one bedroom, only 22 availabilities came up within the city limits.