3 ms·
I don't know how much I buy this. Washington, DC added about 60,000 units between 2015 and now, so a little less proportionally to Austin (with 1 million reside
by underlipton 7mo ago
I don't know how much I buy this. Washington, DC added about 60,000 units between 2015 and now, so a little less proportionally to Austin (with 1 million residents vs 650k). Metro area, 160k more in DC, with a population of 3 million (vs 2.5 million in Austin). Even if DC's unit add is slower than Austin's, you'd expect median rent changes to be within the ballpark, right? Maybe only a slight increase instead of the small decrease Austin saw?
No. Rent doubled.
I don't know if Austin or DC is an outlier, but considering how many states sued property managers and their rental management software providers over price-fixing, I'm leaning toward Austin. In the rest of the country, building more doesn't lower rents. Lowering rents lowers rents. And you have to force landlords to do so.
- ej88 7mo agoAccounting for inflation, rents barely moved from 2022-2024 in D.C.: https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-year https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/average-rent-by-yea... I suspect most of the rent increase is due to inflation (sticker price). Nonetheless rents are still rising, which means 60k units were not enough to outweigh demand.
- underlipton 7mo agoI'm sure 3 years noted for their high inflation rates are indicative of the preceding 7 years which were not. /s
- ej88 7mo agoeither way, it's clear they didn't build enough
- underlipton 7mo agoIt's not, because it's not clear that building actually lowers prices.