Apartment Rent, Housing Costs Soar, Average US Rental Price Surpasses $1,200 for 1st Time

The average monthly price of U.S. apartment rentals has soared back above pre-pandemic levels and nationwide rent costs have now surpassed $1,200 for the first time.

The soaring post-COVID cost of rent rose nearly 10 percent in the first half of 2021 as the country continues pulling out of the pandemic that has gripped the country—and stagnated housing costs—since the spring of 2020.

Real estate experts and research analysts at Apartment List said summer lease renewals this year will lock millions of already-struggling Americans into even higher monthly rent bills. The Apartment List national rent report for the first half of 2021 showed much of the rent increase reflects bounce-back pricing, but the cost of rent has skyrocketed so quickly that the national average is now higher than it was before the pandemic.

The current median cost of renting is actually higher than the $1,192.08 estimate that real estate experts had predicted for this time period before the pandemic. As of June 1, the average actual rent price across the U.S. hit a record $1,219.00. Experts cautioned that higher rents are a price increase that very rarely come back down.

"A rapid rebound in the first half of 2021 wiped out that price gap last month, today, the national median rent is 2 percent higher than where we expect it would have been had 2020 looked like a typical year," the Apartment List researchers noted.

The rent squeeze is expected to hit low- and middle-income renters the hardest and to exacerbate the country's ever-widening wealth gap between homeowners and those living in apartments or on leases. The soaring cost of renting a home or an apartment this summer appears to challenge the consensus among many economists who said pandemic inflation threats will soon fade into the past.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association for Realtors, told Bloomberg on Tuesday that homeowners have seen an estimated $45,000 gain in wealth as house prices jumped to 30-year high in the past year.

Rental market prices nationwide soared an additional 2.3 percent in June, according to the Apartment List estimates, with June and July traditionally being months in which the largest number of leases come back up for renewal each year.

The 9.2 percent national rent index increase seen in this week's Apartment List data analysis is three times more than the typical year average when rental prices grow only by about 2 percent to 3 percent from January to June.

The group's national rental price index hovered around 4 percent from the spring of 2020 through the beginning of 2021, the peak months of the pandemic.

Newsweek reached out to Apartment List for any additional context about its 2021 national rent report on Tuesday afternoon.

rent increase housing prices eviction
A banner against renters eviction reading "no job, no rent" is displayed on a controlled-rent building in Washington, D.C., on August 9, 2020. The average monthly price of U.S. apartment rentals has soared back above... ERIC BARADAT / AFP/Getty Images

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