The rent is high, but that's not stopping people from moving to Tampa Bay.
According to new Apartment List data, rents in the Tampa metro (which includes St. Petersburg) increased 0.7% in the last month and 2.4% overall in the last year.
Valrico is the most expensive city in that area (the median price for a two-bedroom is $1,610) while Tampa proper ($1,280) and St. Petersburg ($1,200) come in behind it.
And while Tampa Bay’s housing market may have peaked (read: prices are declining), people are still choosing to rent instead of buying houses. A lot of renters from other parts of the state and country are specifically looking at Tampa, too.
That’s according to a June renter migration report, which calculated the shares of inbound searches coming from outside metros around the country.
Tampa took a 63% share of those inbound searches, meaning that of all the Apartment List users looking for a place in Tampa, 62.8 % are searching from outside the Tampa metro area. Denver (55%), Baltimore (52%) and San Diego (49%) came in behind us.
The next Florida cities on the inbound searches list are Orlando and Miami — which came in at 43% and 25%, respectively — and many of the searches for apartments in Tampa are actually coming from those nearby Sunshine State metros. According to the report, New York City is the third largest source of inbound searches to Tampa.
Orlando also tops the reports list of cities that renters are looking to leave, which makes complete sense since fast-rising rents have made the City Beautiful the fifth most rent-burdened city in the United States.
So, yeah, lots of folks are looking to rent in Tampa. Not too bad for a place where the average resident can apparently only afford a 619-square-foot apartment, huh?
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This article appears in Jun 27 – Jul 4, 2019.