What to expect from Boston rents in 2016
In total, Bostonians spent more than $13 billion on rent in 2015. What should we expect from 2016?
Here’s a staggering stat: Renters in the Boston metro area spent $13.4 billion keeping a roof over their heads in 2015.
That cost was spread out over 803,000 local renters, according to a Zillow analysis, meaning the average household spent about $16,700 on rent. (This includes a lot of people paying below-market rents, either because they’re getting subsidies or because they’ve been in the same place for a long time.)
The bad news is that Zillow expects Boston’s rents to rise in 2016, but there is a silver lining.
As of December 2015, the median market-rate rent in the Boston metro was $2,309. Zillow predicts that figure will grow 2.75 percent by December 2016, to approximately $2,372.
While any rise in rents probably sounds like bad news to cash-strapped apartment dwellers, it’s actually an improvement over 2015, which saw rents increase by 6.6 percent.
The slowdown in rent growth is a national trend, and Zillow points out that in some areas, incomes could be growing faster than rents by the end of the year, which would be a happy turn of events. From September 2014 to September 2015, Boston wages and salaries grew 3.6 percent, much faster than the country’s average.
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