Pay Up
How Dallas-Fort Worth's $10 billion in rent compares to rest of U.S.
Dallas-Fort Worth has the highest number of renters in Texas, and rents are on the rise, according to a new report from real estate site Zillow. But it’s not all bad news: Our rents are increasing at a slower pace than Houston’s or Austin’s.
In 2014, Dallas-Fort Worth had 951,000 renter households, the largest in the state and fourth-highest nationally. Those renters paid more than $10 billion in rent, which was the seventh-highest in the country. That number was up from 933,000 in 2013.
Comparatively, Houston had the second largest number of renter households in the state, with 832,000; Austin had 290,000. Both, however, saw a bigger jump in rent prices between 2013 and 2014. Austin had the sixth-highest increase in the country, at 9.5 percent, while Houston ranked 15, with a 7.2 percent increase.
Those make Dallas-Fort Worth’s 6.2 percent increase seem relatively stable, and it puts the area at 22nd overall.
All of this comes on the heels of another Zillow report that claims that Dallasites fork over twice as much to rent than buy. So perhaps buying a home ought to be on these renters' to-do lists for 2015.
For its report, Zillow looked at the number of renter households and rent paid among 50 major U.S. markets in 2013 and 2014. There are 41 million renter households in America, and they shelled out $441 billion on rent last year.
Renters in the New York-Northern New Jersey metro paid the biggest chunk: $50 billion cumulatively in rent payments, up from $48.2 billion in 2013. The other five markets ahead of Dallas for total rent paid are Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, D.C. and Miami-Fort Lauderdale. Only New York, LA and Chicago were ahead of Dallas in number of renters.
