by Dan Rafter
Apartment rents might seem sky-high in cities like Chicago, New York City and San Francisco. But there are actually some cities — two significant ones in the Midwest — in which monthly apartments rents are actually falling.
In its May national apartment report, ABODO said that the cities of Lincoln, Nebraska, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, saw the biggest drops in one-bedroom apartment rents in April. The median rents for one-bedroom apartments dropped 8.2 percent when compared to March in both cities, according to ABODO.
Lincoln’s median one-bedroom rent fell to $627 a month in April, a drop of 21 percent from its January median figure of $801. in Fort Wayne, the median apartment rent fell to $493 for a one-bedroom unit in April. That is a dip of 26.4 percent from its January median one-bedroom rent of $671.
Other Midwest markets also saw steep declines in median rents in April, with this number falling by 4.3 percent in Nashville, 3.4 percent in Cleveland and 3.2 percent in Topeka. The only Midwest city to see a big increase in median one-bedroom rents in April was Tulsa, Oklahoma, which saw this figure rise 5.2 percent.
Nationally, the median one-bedroom apartment stood at $1,012 in April, according to ABODO. That is an overall fall of .39 percent from the median price of $1,016 in January of this year.
