Apartment rents in Austin have resumed a downward slide after pausing during the summer months, according to data published by the firm Apartment List.
Compared to a year ago, rents in the city are down 5.4%, much more than the average U.S. decline of 1.4% and the overall Texas decline of 2.2%.
“Austin rents declined sharply over the past month,” Apartment List wrote in a monthly rent report. September was the first full month after expanded unemployment benefits ended.
There was also a window of time in August when local moratoria on evictions were listed, before the Centers for Disease Control issued its own moratorium on September 2.
The decline in September was 0.7%, according to Apartment List.
Apartment List estimates rent levels using median rent statistics from the Census Bureau, then extrapolating forward to the current month using a growth rate calculated from proprietary listing data.
Apartment List says its private listing data “tends to skew toward luxury apartments,” a tendency that its methodology attempts to adjust for.
A separate report by RealPage on October 1 corroborates the trend, though RealPage estimated the decline in Austin rents at 4% from a year ago. That would make it the eight biggest drop in prices for a major U.S. city.
RealPage is a technology provider to real estate owners and managers.
In August, a report by Capitol Market Research estimated that apartment rents had decreased by 2.6% in the Austin MSA since December, the first decline since 2009.
Charles Heimsath, the firm’s president, said that occupancy rates still reflected a “balanced apartment market,” but added that a further decline could give tenants more clout in the market.
His survey relied on data from 237,000 apartment units in nearly 1,000 complexes.
