By james art Rents are falling in the Las Vegas Valley due to a glut of new listings coming on the market, according to a new Redfin study.
The median asking rent for all bedrooms in the Valley was $1,475 at the end of September, down 1.5 percent from August and up 1.7 percent from last September, according to Redfin. Many Sun Belt cities are beginning to report large month-over-month rent declines, including Jacksonville, Fla., (-11.3 percent), Raleigh, North Carolina, (-10.6 percent) and San Diego (-10.4 percent ).
Fluctuations in rental prices vary dramatically right now depending on where you live, said Redfin Senior Economist Shehariar Bokhari.
“Rents remain stable nationally, but they can look very different depending on where you live in the country,” he said. “On the East Coast and in the Midwest, there hasn’t been as much construction activity, so asking rents are going up. Meanwhile, if you’re in a Sun Belt city where construction has boomed since the pandemic, rents are now falling pretty quickly.”
Building boom in Las Vegas
Las Vegas is currently adding a record number of housing units to its total as a flurry of pandemic-era financing has kicked off a construction boom in the city, but Jeffrey Swinger, executive vice president of multifamily investment sales at Colliers International, said in a previous interview with Las Vegas Review-Journal that the pipeline is drying up pretty quickly after this year.
“We’re probably going to have a period of about two years where nothing is being built, so it’s going to get even worse,” he said.
Apartment complexes in the Las Vegas Valley are offering significant discounts right now to attract tenants, including several months of free rent, as vacancy rates rise across the board.
Redfin also reported that asking rents for newly constructed apartments nationwide fell in the second quarter of this year to the lowest level in more than two years.
“Monthly Question rentals for a new one apartments peaked at $1,889 in the first quarter of 2022, but has since declined as the number of new builds apartments shot,” the report said. “Apartment completions rose 18.7% in the first quarter on a year-over-year basis, hitting the highest number in more than a decade.”
Bokhari said it was all just a case of supply and demand.
“New apartment rents are likely to fall a bit more this year because there is still a lot of new construction being completed,” he said. “With new apartments popping up all over the place, landlords are competing with each other to find tenants by slashing rents and offering concessions like free parking. If you’re a renter in a market like Dallas or Nashville where construction is booming, there are probably deals you can find.”
The cities with the largest year-over-year rent increases were Washington, D.C. (12 percent), Virginia Beach, Va. (11.3 percent) and Cleveland (11.1 percent).
Redfin also recently surveyed renters and 31.6 percent of respondents said that housing affordability is a top three issue for them in the upcoming US presidential election and that “Kamala Harris voters are slightly more likely than Donald Trump voters to rank housing affordability as a top issue.”
Contact Patrick Blennerhassett at [email protected].