Jersey City’s seemingly endless streak of rent increases has continued to go in the opposite direction in recent months, despite Hudson County’s largest city still ranking as one of America’s most expensive rental markets.
A new report from Zumper that looked at the average rents nationwide across July showed that Jersey City ranked as the 4th most expensive rental market in the nation. Price of one and two bedrooms in Jersey City settled at medians of $2,820 and $3,180 per month, respectively.
Those numbers rank Jersey City’s average asking rents behind only New York City, San Francisco, and Boston nationwide. However, there is some relief hidden in the headline numbers.
Notably, the price of one-bedrooms in Jersey City is down 17.8% since this time last year, while the cost of the average two-bedroom lease is off 15%. Zumper’s report follows a similar study from earlier this summer, which found that Jersey City ranked even higher nationwide with the third most expensive rent in the country.
While Jersey City is certainly outpacing national trends, rents are actually falling ever so slightly across the country. Zumper’s National Rent Index reveals either flat or declining rates across the board, with the median one-bedroom rent holding steady this July at $1,520, while two-bedrooms dipped 0.3% to $1,905.
On an annual basis, one and two-bedroom rents are down 0.7% and 0.3% across the country. In real dollars, that means the typical one-bedroom is $11 cheaper and a two-bedroom is $6 cheaper than this time last year.
“Even with ongoing economic uncertainty, the U.S. rental market continues to demonstrate striking resilience,” said Zumper CEO Anthemos Georgiades in an analysis of the study. “While the national rent rates are slightly down from last year, that softness is misleading. In the context of a historic wave of new supply, the limited decline in rents is a strong indicator of how powerful renter demand remains.”
The Zumper National Rent Report pulled its data for the study from over a million active rental listings across the country. The listings are then aggregated monthly to calculate median asking rents for the top 100 most populous cities, including all data available in the month of publication.
