Denver experienced a 4.4 percent jump in the median listing price of a one-bedroom unit the past month to $1,393, according to a , a national apartment finding service.
That ranks as the third largest monthly increase of any major metro area after Cleveland and Indianapolis in the survey and represents the first time Denver made the top 10 list for rent increases since Abodo began tracking that measure in 2015.
Colorado Springs ranked fourth with a 3.9 percent monthly increase, which pushed median one-bedroom rents at the start of November to $953 a month.
“There is a lot of pressure on rental properties in Denver right now. Millennials are renting apartments for longer periods of time than the generations that came before them, housing inventory is tighter, and the housing crash has scared a lot of potential homeowners and one group that many people forget about is now renting — Baby Boomers,” said Sam Radbil, a spokesman for the Madison, Wis., company.
One explanation Radbil offers is that boomers are mimicking the millennials’ desire to live the city life, driving up rents in places such as Denver, which is on track for a record year of apartment construction, much of it in the urban core.
A found that median apartment rents slipped in the third quarter from the same period a year earlier and vacancy rates rose as the market absorbed a record 9,713 new units in what will end as a record year for apartment building.
One of the difficulties with rent surveys based on available listings is that they capture the mix of the units available at a given time. If luxury apartment developers complete and list a large number of units in a given period, that drives up the surveyed rents up, even though those units may be sitting empty.
Apartment List, which tries to get around that by measuring rents on the same apartments over time, measured a 0.9 percent decline in rents between September and October and is capturing a modest 2 percent year-over-year gain in Denver area rents.
Apartment List puts Denver’s median two-bedroom rent of $1,330, above the national average of $1,160. Abodo is capturing a wider disparity on one-bedrooms at $1,393 in Denver and $1,032 nationally.
If that isn’t confusing enough, , has one-bedroom apartments rents up 3.7 percent in Denver to $1,390 over the past month, while two-bedroom units dropped 2.8 percent to $1,750.
