An April report from online rental marketplace RentCafe lists Atlanta as the most desired market among potential renters, using data accumulated from the company’s web traffic over the past month.
Topping rental market giants like Manhattan and Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., Atlanta, along with the other two cities rounding out RentCafe’s top-three high-demand markets – Kansas City, Missouri and Albuquerque, New Mexico – each share common attributes that make these areas attractive to potential renters: unit affordability, job opportunity and diversity in entertainment.
Listings in the city garnered some of the highest user engagement on RentCafe’s site for the month of April, generating higher numbers of digital clicks, saves and searches when compared to months prior.
To critique qualifying cities, RentCafe developed four categories in which to score and rank 30 of the most popular rental markets across the country: apartment availability, the number of digital page views received by apartment listings, the number of saved personalized searches conducted by RentCafe visitors and the number of apartments saved to users’ personal ‘favorites’.
Atlanta scored the highest of all evaluated markets using RentCafe’s methodology this month, rising from second to first place since March.
According to a previous analysis from RentCafe, the average rent in Atlanta across all neighborhoods and apartment types came to $1,846 when measured this past February. Just under 50% of the city’s rental stock at the time of assessment was priced between $1,500 and $2,000.
Though, Alexandra Both, senior creative writer at RentCafe and author of the report, said that Atlanta’s popularity among RentCafe users doesn’t necessarily signify a considerable citywide price increase in the near future.
“Rent increases haven’t been our focus in this report particularly,” Both said. “What we’ve been more focused on is [seeing] where people want to move, what cities attract renters right now, and where all the rental buzz is happening.”
Although the report avoids dissecting findings further into descriptive categories like age demographic and apartment type, Both said studio models are growing in popularity across the board, as these units are typically more affordable when compared to their more spacious counterparts.
Both also said that the approaching summer months may spur shifts among RentCafe’s top-30 rental markets over the next several months. However , Atlanta is likely to maintain its status as a popular market, even after the effects of peak rental season begin to show in the company’s future data.
“Given the fact that peak rental season is just starting, we might see more shifts [in upcoming monthly rankings],” Both said. “Maybe things will look a little different next summer or towards the end of this summer, but I’m not expecting a major shift when it comes to Atlanta in the next couple of months.”