“Metro Denver apartment rents, historically restrained, have broken off the leash and are running up, up, up — like a loose dog on the trail of a deer.
Average metro Denver apartment rents rose 12.2 percent in the fourth quarter and 12.1 percent in the first from the same quarters of 2014.
Those back-to-back annual gains are the biggest captured in the area since Gordon von Stroh, a professor at the University of Denver, started surveying rents back in the early 1980s, according to an analysis from housing economist Ryan McMaken.
“Even during the late 1990s, during the tech boom, rent growth was not as strong as it is now,” McMaken said.
Rent increases are outpacing those seen in past periods of strong in-migration, are beyond what inflation and income gains would dictate, and can’t be fully explained by the current vacancy rate.
Those gains also have pushed the average apartment rent in metro Denver to $1,203 a month, also a record.
To appreciate how unusual those increases are, the last time average apartment rents managed to pull off a double-digit annual increase was back in the third quarter of 1992 and, before that, in 1982, according to a long-running rent survey from the Apartment Association of Metro Denver.
And since 1981, rent increases have averaged about 4 percent a year.”
Svaldi, Aldo. Denver Post 13 May 2015.