Resilient: Apartment rents in Twin Cities aren’t booming, but they’re still holding steady

Apartment rents across the country remained mostly flat in July, according to the latest report from apartment search site ABODO. But in good news for local landlords and apartment owners, monthly rents in the Minneapolis and St. Paul markets outperformed many large cities across the United States.

Why were rents so flat? To no one’s surprise, ABODO pointed to COVID-19. The company’s researchers predicted that the more expensive rental markets in the country — such as San Francisco and New York City — might continue to see median rents trend down throughout the rest of the year. The company said that the rest of the country’s apartment market will likely see only sluggish rent growth.

According to ABODO’s research, the median monthly rent for one-bedroom units in Minneapolis stood at $1,393 in early July. That is an increase of 1.46 percent from where this figure stood in June. In St. Paul, the median monthly one-bedroom apartment rent stood at $1,274 in July. That’s an even healthier increase of 3.07 percent from June.

Those median rent increases aren’t huge ones. But they are higher that what ABODO found in many other major cities.

For instance, ABODO reported that the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco dropped 4.58 percent in July when compared to June. In New York City, this figure dropped 1.57 percent. In Nashville, median one-bedroom rents dipped 2.07 percent from June to July, and they fell by 1.13 percent in Toledo.

St. Paul and Minneapolis, though, did not perform as well when it came to two-bedroom rents. The median monthly rent for two-bedroom apartments reached $1,893 in Minneapolis for July. That is a tiny 0.05 percent increase from June. And in St. Paul, the median monthly two-bedroom rent hit $1,604. That was the same median rent that St. Paul saw in June, with this figure neither rising nor falling.

The mostly flat apartment rents in the Twin Cities and the rest of the country is no surprise. While the multifamily market has performed better than most other commercial real estate sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic, the coronarvirus outbreak has still taken a toll on the apartment market. There aren’t many apartment owners increasing rents today.

According to the report, the median one-bedroom apartment rent across the United States stood at $1,104 in July. That’s up just 1.66 percent from January, when the median monthly rent for a one-bedroom unit was $1,086.

Rents for two-bedroom units were even less impressive. ABODO said that the median monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment unit in the United States hit $1,344 in July. That’s actually down — 0.15 percent — from January, when that figure stood at $1,346.