DALLAS — If you are in the month-to-month struggle to keep up with your rent payment, it may be hard to believe this, but many Texans are seeing some rent relief.
Apartmentlist.com looked at all of last year and a good chunk of this year and found rents down in many of the big Texas metros. From January 2023 through September 2024, they noted that Houston rents had ticked up by an average of +.2%. But in that same time frame, they saw average rent decreases of -1.2% for the Dallas metro, -2.4% in the San Antonio area, and a more substantial -8.1% in the Austin market.
Even if you are one of those renters who has gotten a recent ‘break’, you would be forgiven if you didn’t really notice the decrease. That’s because in 2021 and 2022, rents inflated by double digits before deflating a bit in ‘23 and ‘24. Also from apartmentlist.com, the cumulative average rent change in that period in Houston was +13.4%. In the San Antonio area, it was +17.8%, in the Dallas market, it was +21%, and in Austin, they found rents had soared in those two years by +26.1%.
Rental concessions being offered
All that said, when your lease is about to expire, you always want the upper hand with the landlord so you can get a better deal. That’s especially true after big runups in rent like many have experienced in recent years. You might not be expecting it, but many property managers have been skipping the upper hand escalation and making concessions instead.
Zillow’s most recent rental market report includes this screaming subheading: “Concessions hit record high while renter competition hits record low”. The report lays out that “37.7% of rentals on Zillow offered concessions in October”.
This summer, Zillow said more than half its rental listings in Austin were offering concessions. In the most recent report, the company said that over the last year, the number of listings in Austin offering concessions had increased by 13.7%.
So, there are deals to be had, but they still make you work for it sometimes. A friend of ‘Right on the Money’ told me recently that they had renewed. Their rent had gone up hundreds of dollars a month in recent years.
Let's make a deal
So, when the apartment manager proposed “just” a $40 monthly increase this time, they may have expected the renter to be happy with that. He wasn’t. Disappointed, angry and determined, this renter checked the apartment complex website and found identical units and even some newer units in the same complex going for less than the renewal offer they had been given. They took that info to the property manager along with apartmentlist.com stats like these for the micro market around them showing rents around them going down.
The property manager agreed to the better deal, provided that the renter would physically move to one of the identical units in the complex. The renter was willing. But in the end, the management allowed the renter to stay put. More importantly, their rent payment stayed put as well!
That made the renter wonder how many other tenants don’t bother to negotiate and either just accept another incremental increase or reject it, leave, and pay all the costs associated with moving. The takeaway: Do your research, negotiate, and maybe get your way in this current environment.
If you are looking for some advice on negotiating your rent, there are suggestions from the pros here, here, and here that may help.
Apartments going up (and up) in Dallas
This summer we got the report that new apartment construction this year is hitting a historic high and that Dallas accounts for the second-highest number of new apartment units coming online this year, 32,932 of them. That’s just three fewer new units than New York City, which is the number one city for apartment construction this year, with 32,935 new units coming online.
So, if you are looking for a new rental relationship, there are plenty of new options. Redfin just looked at data from the first two quarters of this year and found that asking rents for newly constructed apartments had the sharpest drops that they have seen in five years.
They reported that new complexes are competing with each other by reducing rents and offering concessions like free parking. They specifically mention Dallas as a place where deals are likely to be found.
They also note that in Austin, the third-fastest growing apartment construction market in the country, asking rents have fallen 17.6% over the last year, and they expect the lower asking rent trends to continue through this year.
Redfin also reports that the one-bedroom unit saw the biggest decline in asking rent in the second quarter of this year; the median national asking rent for those was $1,566–down 9% from a year ago.