When you live in Greater Boston, it can feel like the rent never stops climbing. Each year, the price of signing a new lease, or resigning an old one, grows more expensive — whether it be by $50 or $200 — than it was last year.
Indeed, there’s some truth to that.
In many metropolitan areas across the US, rents have trended down over the last year or so, particularly in places where an abundance of new housing has come online.
Not Greater Boston.
Rent in this housing-starved region has grown more expensive in nearly every community over the last year, according to a new monthly rent tracker launched by the Globe that compares rental trends at the local level.
The tracker relies on data from the rental listing website Apartment List, which provides snapshots of monthly average rents for one- and two-bedroom apartments in different municipalities based on a combination of the website’s database of apartment listings and Census data.
Here are the latest rent growth trends for various types of apartments in Eastern Massachusetts.
And while rents have climbed everywhere, they’ve gone up faster in some parts of the region than others, particularly in lower-cost suburbs and cities outside of Boston’s urban core.
As rents in Boston and the municipalities that immediately surround it have climbed to prohibitive prices, more renters have been seeking out lower costs, and often more living space, by moving further away from the city. But while they might find a bargain relative to where they’re coming from, they can generally afford to pay more than longtime residents typically have, effectively driving up rents in the process. The pandemic-era rise in remote work has helped fuel that shift as well.
That’s a big reason why Peabody has seen the fastest rent growth over the past year. The overall median rent there was $2,125 in January, up nearly 7 percent over the last 12 months.
Rent growth was noticeably slower in communities such as Malden and Boston.
Still, the fact that rents here have been climbing is a sign of just how severe the region’s housing shortage has become. While rents have been falling nationally, Greater Boston’s supply shortage has kept demand here sky high, pushing prices higher. A key difference between Greater Boston and regions that have seen price dips is the rate of new supply that has come online.
See where median home prices have risen the most
Boston saw something of a permitting boom in 2021, but construction is slowing down considerably, and permits for new housing development are being issued at one of the slowest rates in over a decade.
It also doesn’t help that the rise in interest rates over the past two years has locked many prospective home buyers out of homeownership, infusing even more demand into the rental market. That dynamic has played out nationwide, but it is especially prevalent here because rental prices are so high, and Greater Boston has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the US.
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