Median Rental Price Appreciation Is Speeding Up

According to data from Zillow, national median rent prices have grown at the fastest pace since May 2016 over the past year, up 2.8 percent to $1,445.

Low supply of available homes for sale is helping drive up median rents once more, despite the rental appreciation slowdown of the past two years, following an influx of newly-constructed apartments. CNBC reports that while the national apartment occupancy rate was 95 percent at the end of 2017, some anticipate that this could increase over the course of 2018.

Rising mortgage rates only exacerbate the problem because they decrease affordability for potential buyers as well. New households are forming at the fastest pace in two years, and more of them are owner households, a reversal from the recession when renter households outpaced owners by far. But current renters are not moving to ownership at even close to a normal pace, and that is keeping occupancies high.

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