DALLAS — Need a little more elbow room or a home office to meet your work-from-home needs? Upsizing an apartment in Dallas is cheaper than the national average. But renters looking to add a bedroom and save money, too, should consider ditching the city limits of Big D for Lancaster or Mesquite.
Those were some of the findings from the latest study by RENTCafé, which used a proprietary formula to calculate the cost of getting an apartment with an extra bedroom, regardless of the apartment size a renter is upgrading from.
Renters would have to pay an extra $296 for another bedroom in Dallas. This adds up to $3,552 more per year. While that’s a wad of cash, it’s less than the national average of $330, or $3,960 a year.
Nationwide, roughly one in three renters want to upsize their apartments according to a recent survey on RENTCafé’s website. Whether it's because they need a home-office space or just more room for the family, 35 percent of the surveyed renters want to upsize.
Dallas renters seeking a cheaper place with more space can head for a nearby town or suburb and save, the study points out.
Lancaster is the cheapest alternative to upgrade to from Dallas.Renters can get an extra bedroom and pay $99 less on monthly rent, saving $1,188 a year.
Mesquite looks like the second-best choice. Upgrading here would be $44 cheaper than the current Dallas rent. Annually, renters would save $528.
By going to Fort Worth and upsizing, renters would have to dish out an extra $157 each month. An additional bedroom in Irving is even costlier, requiring $215 more compared to the Dallas rent.
The most expensive place to get one more bedroom is Frisco, which would need $588 more each month, or a total of $7,056 yearly.
As for how apartment sizes now under construction are trending locally, North Texas multifamily developers are building larger apartments in the suburbs, but smaller units in the two biggest cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, according to another study by RENTCafé and Yardi Matrix.
Current multifamily projects under construction in McKinney, for example, will have an average apartment size of 1,015 square feet for rental complexes in the works, which is 98 square feet larger than in the last five years. That ranked McKinney as the eighth-largest increase in apartment size in the U.S. compared to five years ago.
The monthly and annual costs to add a bedroom when moving from Dallas to other select North Texas cities are:
- Arlington, $51 monthly; $612 per year
- Garland, $62; $744
- Waxahachie, $76;, $912
- Bedford, $153; $1,836
- Denton, $157; $1,884
- Cedar Hill, $177; $2,124
- Grand Prairie, $217; $2,604
- Wylie, $224; $2,688
- Euless, $231; $2,772
- Northlake, $265; $3,180
- Carrollton, $273; $3,276
- McKinney, $356; $4,272
- Mansfield, $400; $4,800
- Allen, $401; $4,812
- Richardson, $402; $4,824
- Plano, $451; $5,212
- Keller, $465; $5,580
- Coppell, $494; $5,928
- Addison, $519; $6,228
