With apartment vacancies at a 22-year low, Southern Californians shopping for a rental over the past few months faced limited options and rapidly escalating rents as the apartment market rebounds from the pandemic.
A Southern California News Group composite from three rental indexes shows the asking rent for a vacant unit in L.A. County jumped an average 10% from a year ago during the fourth quarter of 2021, snapping a 12-month lull that pushed L.A. rents down during the pandemic.
The same composite showed Orange County asking rents rose an average 18% during the fourth quarter, and Inland Empire rents were up 17%.
SCNG averaged fourth-quarter data compiled by apartment trackers RealPage, Moody’s Analytics-Reis and CoStar.
Vacancy rates, meanwhile, fell to the lowest level last spring in CoStar records dating back to 2000, and to their lowest levels in RealPage and Moody’s-Reis records dating back to 2010. Vacancies were only slightly higher in the fourth quarter, averaging 3.3% in L.A. County, 2.2% in Orange County and 2.3% in the Inland Empire, composite data shows.
As a general rule, rents are expected to drop when vacancies are above 5% and go up when they’re below 5%.
Now, the rents are climbing again.
Composite numbers from the three rental indexes show Orange County’s average rent at the tail end of 2021 was $2,432 a month, or $368 a month more than in the fourth quarter of 2020.
The L.A. County average was $2,264 a month, up $205 in a year; the Inland Empire average was $1,873 a month, up $272.
Those are the biggest one-year gains in the composite index dating at least to 2011.
Provided by Jeff Collins with Orange County Register.