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Miami is the hottest rental market in the U.S. — and that’s not because of the weather.
RentCafe in a recent report named the Magic City as the most competitive metro for apartment hunters during the peak summer renting season, as a typical apartment has 19 renters vying for a lease, the highest amount in the country.
Additionally, 96.5 percent of apartments are occupied there — the highest rate — and units are vacant for an average of 32 days, the second-lowest amount of time.
Other metrics analyzed by the apartment search platform were the percentage of renters who renewed their leases and the share of new apartments recently finished.
Miami, the most competitive market last year as well, also topped the lists for those metrics. Almost 72 percent of leases there are renewed, a figure second to suburban Philadelphia, which has a lease renewal rate of 76.5 percent. When it came to the largest share of newly constructed units, Miami came in third, behind Omaha, Nebraska and Broward County, Florida, at 1.18 percent.
Chicago ranked second overall for the hottest rental market, and third place went to the suburban Chicago area. In those areas, there are 16 and 15 renters, respectively, for every available pad. Their vacancy rates are in the mid-95-percent range.
Developers in the Chicago area, however, don’t appear to be keeping up with the demand for apartments there. In Chicago, 0.33 percent of apartments are new. In suburban Chicago, just 0.2 percent are new; these are among the lowest shares in RentCafe’s top-20 ranking.
The market that saw the greatest growth in its competitiveness this year from last year was the suburban Twin Cities area in Minnesota and Wisconsin, which placed fifth overall on RentCafe’s ranking.
In the suburbs of the Twin Cities, an apartment unit has remained vacant an average of 34 days, and the vacancy rate there is just under 95 percent. For every apartment, there are on average 11 rental hopefuls.